Dear Folks: September 24, 2000
Dear Folks,
Sunday morning, rainy and dreary, everyone is inside coughing and wheezing. I brought back a bug from Balaton and promptly passed it to my dear housemates. The place sounds like a tuberculosis ward. Ah, community! Togetherness in suffering!
It’s the equinox, days suddenly, strikingly shorter. Not light enough to open the chickenhouse (which is how I measure my days) until [...]
The Death Tax Does Not Deserve To Die
by Donella Meadows
— September 21, 2000 —
Last month the Republican Congress nearly managed to wipe out the inheritance tax — which Republicans call the “death tax,” as if it were a severance tax on departures, rather than an income tax on inheritors.
I have never been able to understand why, if we’re going to tax income at all, we should consider [...]
An Environmentalist Encounters An Environmental Law
by Donella Meadows
— September 14, 2000 —
Now that I’ve suffered under one firsthand, I can understand why people hate environmental laws.
On a map of our farm filed away at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a fateful dot. It stands for an endangered Siberian Chive, observed by someone decades ago. This dot popped up when we applied under Vermont’s [...]
Let’s Stop Racing Each Other And Go For Bear Instead
by Donella Meadows
— September 7, 2000 —
I’ve heard the joke about the bear before, and so, probably, have you. Two guys are sitting outside their tent in a forest campsite when they see a huge angry bear charging toward them. One starts lacing up his running shoes. The other says, “Are you crazy? You’ll never outrun that bear!” The first [...]
Systems Thinking Primer for Natural Capitalism: The Four Basic Shifts
By Peter Senge, Don Seville, Amory Lovins, and Chris Lotspeich~
Overview and Goal of Primer
The aim of this primer is to develop a common “systems language” for thinking, communicating, and building shared knowledge for building environmentally sustainable enterprises and industries. As societies and organizations around the world gradually shift to seeing environmental sustainability as a strategic imperative, there is a growing [...]
