Neatniks of the World, Arise!
By Donella Meadows
–July 23, 1998–
Well, last Saturday I had one of my neatness explosions.
I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen with a housemate who is even farther out on the tidiness spectrum than I am. We picked up and scrubbed away monuments to unconsciousness that people had been steadfastly ignoring (and working around and tripping over) for days. We had [...]
Eating into Resilience Saves Money — in the Short Run
By Donella Meadows
–July 16, 1998–
I’m told there are two million programmers working full time to get the Y2K “millennium bug” out of our computers. Judging from my email, I’d guess there are another two million discussing the problem, warning about it, hyperventilating about it.
Not that there isn’t a problem. To save time and computer memory, early programmers wrote only the [...]
Y2K and the Average Bite of Food
By Donella Meadows
–July 2, 1998–
The average bite of food eaten by an American travels 1300 miles from field to mouth.
That statistic is quoted over and over by people who want us to think about how distant we are from our basic sustenance, how vulnerable our lives have become, how dependent on systems we can’t control or even understand. These people [...]
The Long Wave
By Donella Meadows
–This piece was published in Whole Earth, summer 1998.–
Dozens of people are eager to explain the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies. Few of them predicted it. Other economic implosions, from the 1995 failure of Britain’s venerable Barings Bank to the 1987 dive in the US stock market, have been explained primarily after the fact.
Similarly, the 1994 rise to [...]
The News Behind the News
By Donella Meadows
–July 9, 1998–
Thirty years ago Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb and I paid no attention. I was engrossed in biochemistry research and preparing to go on a year-long trip halfway around the world. I doubt if I could have listed more than the top two of the world’s ten most populous nations. They were, in 1968 (with [...]
