Dear Folks: March 24, 1996
Dear Folks, “March is a Winter Month! March is a Winter Month!” I keep repeating to myself when I get antsy this time of year. March is also twice as long as any other month, or so it seems, as the thawing tries to win out over the freezing and then gets knocked back by a cold Canadian air mass.
Two weeks [...]
Success to the Successful
By Donella Meadows
–March 21, 1996–
I don’t know how any parent could stand to send his or her child off to a crumbling, dirty school with underpaid teachers and hostile, possibly armed, classmates. If it were my kid, rather than do that, I’d exert some “school choice,” whether the government sanctioned it or not.
That’s why the push toward state-supported school choice [...]
Chemicals Are a Means, Not an End
By Donella Meadows
–March 14, 1996–
We thought DDT was great, until we found robins dying on our lawns and eagle eggs broken in their nests.
Thalidomide eased morning sickness in pregnant women; then their babies were born without arms or legs.
Our cars performed better with tetraethyl lead in the gas, but the lead came out the tailpipes and poisoned us.
Everyone believed that [...]
Avoiding Another Silent Spring
By Donella Meadows
–March 7, 1996–
In late 1987 Dr. Ana Soto walked into her lab at Tufts University Medical School and found her tissue culture plates overrun with breast cancer cells. In years of research, she had never seen anything like it.
Soto and her colleague Dr. Carlos Sonnenschein were trying to isolate the inhibiting factor in blood that normally keeps cells [...]
How Environmentalists Ought to Talk
By Donella Meadows
–February 29, 1996–
Environmentalists are too gloomy. They invent catastrophes to attract attention and money. Bugs and trees are what they care about, not people. They want to lock up resources. They use long words, like “biodiversity” and “endocrine disrupters.” They’re elitist city folk who care about nature only as a place to go backpacking.
Accusations like these used to [...]
