There’s “Survivor” and then There’s Real Survival
by Donella Meadows
— August 31, 2000 —
Linda Harrar is an independent filmmaker, based in Boston but usually traveling the world producing documentaries for NOVA and other PBS programs. Through the lens of the camera, she sees a lot. In the editing room she sees it over and over. It sinks in deep.
So she had a strong reaction to the CBS [...]
Dear Folks: August 27, 2000
Dear Folks,
YES! The bulldozers are rolling!
It’s been an amazing, nonstop, exciting month. Groundbreaking day turned out to be Monday morning, August 14, two weeks ago. After all we had gone through to get to that point, and after so many postponements, and after the breathtaking last-minute coming together of the essential elements (especially the Act 250 permit), we had no [...]
Taking Over From God On The Seventh Day
by Donella Meadows
— August 24, 2000 —
“If I gamble, I usually gamble at high-stakes, high-payoff games.” That’s a boast not from James Bond, but from a chemist speaking to the prestigious journal Science (the July 14 issue, from which all quotes but the last one in this column are taken). His name is Peter Schultz. He works at Scripps Research [...]
How It Happened That We Don’t Regulate Biotech
by Donella Meadows
— August 17, 2000 —
Back in the 1970s scientists got their first inkling that they might actually be able to redesign genes. That awesome possibility started an ethical and regulatory flurry. Distinguished panels of scientists met to ask imponderable questions. Could some human-created form of life get loose and carry self-multiplying havoc into the world? How could we [...]
A World Food Production Quiz
by Donella Meadows
— August 10, 2000 —
In some ways the world food situation hasn’t changed for decades. There are still millions of starving people. There are still places where so much food is grown that it has to be thrown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute the countryside; soil erodes; groundwater tables drop. Every year when the new statistics come out, [...]
