The New American Dream Home
By Donella Meadows
–August 7, 1997–
On the cover of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine section, THE NEW AMERICAN DREAM HOME invites us to enter its softly lit, splendidly arched, mostly glass, double front door.
An arrow points to the “KITCHEN: Adjoining ‘great room’ and eat-in nook give busy families space to congregate; a countertop personal computer lets the cook fetch recipes or the [...]
Is a Bioengineered Potato Organic?
By Donella Meadows
–July 31, 1997–
It’s tempting for someone who has grown some carrots any old way to slap the label “organic” on them and get a higher price. Whenever there’s real value around, someone will come up with a counterfeit.
So farmers who raise their vegetables with the care that the word “organic” implies have been working on certification programs with [...]
Dear Folks: July 27,1997
Dear Folks, It’s early Sunday morning and foggy. Ominous. Morning fog in this valley is a sign of fall. When the air starts cooling but the land is still full of evapotranspirating greenery, we fog up every morning, unless it’s actively raining. If you go up in the mountains, you quickly rise out of the fog into brilliant sun — you [...]
From Dump to Garden: Burlington’s Intervale
By Donella Meadows
–July 24, 1997–
The Intervale, the green floodplain where the Winooski River winds through Burlington, Vermont, was once the site of flourishing farms. Green Mountain Boy Ethan Allen had a homestead there, and long before him the Abenaki Indians cultivated the fertile soil. But as the city grew, the valley degenerated into a weedy urban wasteland, literally on the [...]
The Big Squeeze
By Donella Meadows
–July 17, 1997–
I don’t travel by air all that often, so I can’t get used to the squeezed-in seats. Every time I get in a plane it seems they’ve shaved another half-inch from the seat width, and the rows are an inch closer together. When the person in front of you leans back nowadays, his or her head [...]
