Citizens Who Love Their Ponds Can Help to Save Them
By Donella Meadows
–July 11, 1996–
The good news is that our Clean Water Act, plus billions of dollars in municipal treatment plants and industrial wastewater processing, has rescued many of our streams and lakes from sewerhood.
The bad news is that, with the nastiest waste pipes cleaned up, we still insult our waterbodies with filled-in wetlands, runoff from lawns and farms, here [...]
You Can’t Live on the Pond and Have the Pond
By Donella Meadows
–July 6, 1996–
Les Kaufman called me from the Boston University Marine Program, sputtering about Title Five. “How do you get people to care about little brown fish?” he grumbled. “I always thought clean ponds were a New England thing. Now we’re turning the place into Texas, where you can’t see three inches into the water, and no one [...]
Dear Folks: July 28, 1996
Dear Folks, Well, if we could just average together last year and this year, we’d end up with two terrific growing seasons.
Every Saturday morning I empty the rain gauge on our garden gate and write the week’s accumulation on the calendar in the kitchen. Last summer the readings went like this — 0” – 0” – 1/2” – 0” – 0” [...]
Competition Comes to Your Electric Company
By Donella Meadows
–June 27, 1996–
The airlines were deregulated, and we got lower prices on popular routes, higher prices on all other routes, a weakened government oversight system and a Valujet crash.
The phone companies were allowed to compete, and the result was lower prices for long distance calls, higher prices for local ones and a constant onslaught of noisy ads and [...]
Dear Folks: June 23, 1996
Dear Folks, I’m supposed to be in Africa, but because of various breakdowns, I’m not, and I can’t say I’m sorry. I hate to miss a single day of the farm in June.
The first-ever regional meeting of the Balaton Group in Africa was scheduled to start tomorrow in Naivasha, Kenya. Our African members picked as their topic “community resource management,” a [...]
