Letter to Dana

by Aromar Revi

Dear Dana,

You’ve unexpectedly placed us in a very challenging situation. Taking on the world almost alone, is nothing new to you. We’ve seen you do it year after year, with such clarity of purpose, grace and charm that it seemed utterly simple. No longer. We walk the path in leaden shoes and with a heavy heart.

In all these years of knowing and trying to learn from you, some of your love of the earth and all her children, your burning aspiration for truth and justice and your egalitarian compassion and respect for diversity has taken root among us — your extended family.

But it is going to take all of our conscious faculties, inspiration and commitment to try and work in concert to bring (y)our dream of a healed earth and a realised future for our grandchildren into being. In this life, in this century.

Few have expressed the challenge and opportunities of our troubled times as well as you, in your writing and teaching. But those who have been able to share time with you in nineteen years of Balaton, are truly lucky.

The news that you were being taken off the hospital ventilator came during the Steering Committee meeting at Zürich when we were planning the 20th Balaton anniversary meeting: of friends of Dana (and Dennis) Meadows.

Your timing was impeccable as usual, but as Wouter would say this time the ratio of response to respite time reached out to infinity. This was one limit, which we forgot we needed to cross…

I’m really grateful for the weekend I got to spend with you at Cobb Hill last September. I especially cherish the long walk we took across the farm and the cohousing site, through the forest with the maple lines and ski trails to the lookout site high on the hill overlooking the valley.

You showed me Vermont through your eyes: the blaze of changing colours of fall; the continental ‘divide’ between the Americas and Europe across the river; the rich farmland abused by suburban development; dairy farmers struggling to stay solvent amidst rich stockbrokers who rear exotic livestock on weekend retreats and spiritual communities from far away lands and times. In your inimitable way, you painted a motion picture of a dynamic landscape over a few hundred years: old-growth forest giving way to farm and then bald pastureland with oak trees and sheep and then in your vision back again to forest, part farm and wholly sustainable community.

The conversation on that bright almost-autumn day slipped easily back and forth between: the challenge of feeding China and its impact on climate change; the hardness of the bedrock below the co-housing site and the ‘injury’ caused by blasting; the complications of modelling global commodity cycles; the cussedness of snowmobiles; the future of the Balaton Group; how to distinguish poisonous mushrooms from good ones; the renegade potential of the WTO; the qualities of llama dung as a fertiliser; the challenges of building real consensus among communities and the refreshing quality of pond water on the Hunt Farm where you drench yourself after a hot summer day of work in the garden. In short, an unforgettable ordinary day in your full life.

But what I still can’t understand is how one of the most brilliant teachers and practitioners of systems science, could fall for such a simple trap as you did? Refusing to go to the doctor in time for a chronic (minor) ailment, because of overbearing pressure to ‘do’ leading to a catastrophic systemic failure of ‘being’.

Isn’t that what un-sustainability is all about? Isn’t that a classic case of ‘constraining negative feedback’ a cardinal sin in your classic paper ‘Ten Ways to Change the System’? Remember your wicked jokes, about Balaton people being the most unsustainable on the planet, always living on negative time.

Unflinching stubbornness to get to the bottom of things is one of your great qualities, but I think that this time you’ve tested the system outside its operational range. Its one thing to play with the implications of the Second Law in the abstract, and another to be confronted with it in reality so early. Too early. Do you remember our discussion (while digging and storing a dozen sacks of potatoes in your cellar) on the need to go to work on a Third and Fourth Law linking information and inspiration with the unchanging.

I’m still mad at you today for leaving so many conversations unfinished, in half stride…

Many of us tried rather hard to bring you to India for the millennium. I thought it would be a fitting closure and an inspiration for the writing of Beyond the Limits II — 30 years on from your last trip that had such a strong influence on your experience.

Dana Meadows: The Second-to-Last Chapter

by Hal Hamilton

I write this brief description of those past few years from within the experience. Susie and I moved from Kentucky to join Cobb Hill, work at the institute, and learn from Dana. We miss her dreadfully.

It’s now spring here. Sugar-filled sap is flowing from the Maple trees up on the ridge down through small pipes into a building where it is boiled to one-fortieth of its original volume and put into maple syrup jugs for sale. In the greenhouse, with snow shoveled away from the entrance, new vegetable sprouts begin to stretch toward their summer home out in the field.

Dana will miss this year, what would have been her sixtieth year. Twenty-three households at Cobb Hill and about ten colleagues in the institute will build on our dreams that include hers, and commit ourselves to trying to “walk our talk.” We in the Institute will continue to search for high leverage solutions to the most intractable problems facing our planet.

But this article is about Dana. During these last few years she poured herself into the new landed community and its sister intellectual center, the Sustainability Institute.

Dana visioned these communities, helped create them, and now she has left them to a grateful group of friends and colleagues. Back in 1993 she wrote the following vision for herself:

I could see myself with fully gray hair, looking vibrantly healthy. I was speaking in public. I was a constant presence in public discourse. I was calm and quiet, not flashy, not charismatic. My purpose was to insert into the discussion as much perspective, as broad a space horizon, as ethical a position as I could. My goal was to be clear, loving and wise.

I had no particular position or power, other than my willingness to show up and to speak truth. But — and here was the surprising and wonderful part — I was speaking from and for a community. This was a community in which I lived day to day. It was composed of people more clear, more loving, more wise, more spiritual than me. Together we studied and spoke about all the issues in public discourse and tried to work toward the clearest, most insightful position we could find. And then I was sent out (I was not the only one) to speak that position in public. The community prepared me for these appearances and critiqued them to help me do better next time. When I lost my way, when I got knocked off center, when I got scared or discouraged or angry, the community lovingly helped me find myself again.

I couldn’t see where I lived, on this farm [Foundation Farm in New Hampshire] or any farm, though it was clear to me that the community lived by the wisdom it preached. I did not see myself writing, only speaking. (That was weird. Maybe it was a recognition that hardly anyone reads any more.) As with every vision, I arched into the future without any concern about how to get there from here, so I have no idea whether I created this community, or found it somewhere and went to join it.

What I conclude is that I must find or create a group of people to live with who are dedicated to a just, peaceful and sustainable world, both in the way they live and in the way they reach out to impact the public discourse, the language, the context, the frame, the mindset of the larger community.

Well, who knows what will happen? I have a new vision now to work toward. Meanwhile, if there’s one more nice day outdoors I have raspberries to prune. If there isn’t, I have a basement to clean.

Dana did create a community, a professional and a living community entwined. We have more raspberries to plant, and we have not yet risen to the level of wisdom and impact she envisioned. But here we are, Cobb Hill and the Sustainability Institute.

Cobb Hill is now the name of a place within a larger place. Our little cluster of 22 housing units nestles into a hillside over the farmyard, and past that the village of Hartland Four Corners. From the southeast the spire of the local church rises up from among the village trees. Next to the church is Skunk Hollow Tavern. In the other direction, up the northeasterly valley, our farm stretches through fertile bottoms, along hillside pastures, and up to the sugar bush of Maples and stands of Hemlock and Pine.

The Cobb Hill houses are very efficient, heated by a common wood fired boiler, with a gravity fed water system from our own well, flowing out of the houses as gray water because the only toilets are composting ones. On the way to the barnyard lies our “common house,” with large spaces for eating and meeting, and three apartments in one wing.

In one corner of the basement of the common house is our cheese cave, home for Ascutney Mountain Cheese, made from the milk of our small herd of Jersey cows. The farm shop will sell not only this cheese but also organic vegetables, eggs and maple syrup from the farm. Eventually we’ll also be displaying the products of the Art Barn at the other end of the farm. This lumbering old dairy barn will soon be remodeled into art studio space. It sits across from our sugarhouse, where the maple syrup is produced.

For twelve years I was the numbers person in our office — digging out time series data that would show graphically the trends Dana was describing in her writing. The challenge from Dana — “someone must have measured that” — would come after a discussion about why the commonly cited numbers didn’t show what was really going on in the system. Total fish catch was continuing to go up, not revealing the crashing down of each species as it was overfished. Lumber harvest was continuing to increase, masking the declining quality of the lumber we all saw at the local hardware stores. Those numbers didn’t tell the full story, and it was my job to find the data that did.

Graphs could really move Dana. Often they were the exponential growth or growth-then-crash curves that became so familiar. But one time it was a flat graph stopped her in her tracks. We were working on Beyond the Limits. I was updating a series of food production charts for different regions of the world. Food production per person had grown from 1960 to the present in Europe and North America, and to a lesser extent in Latin America and Asia. Then Dana flipped to the chart for Africa — and groaned. The graph showed a slow decline over 30 years. For all the technological changes in the second half of the 20th century, the green revolution, the years of international aid, Africans were no better off. That picture really hit Dana hard. Behind the numbers she saw real people — caught in a trap and starving.

Dana had her own traps that she tried hard to avoid. She did all her writing on a computer and most of her correspondence over the internet. She was not afraid of change when it was useful. But, she saw no point in upgrading to a faster computer or newer software just for the sake of change. “I don’t want to upgrade my system! It does everything I want it to do,” she would say when a colleague sent a document she couldn’t open because it had been written in a newer program. But eventually she would be pushed by the need to work with others into the trap of “technology creep” — a feedback loop she knew well from seeing “capacity creep” in the Sustainability Institute’s commodity models of corn, shrimp and forest systems. In spite of her reluctance, she would eventually buy the new computer or upgrade the software. But she stubbornly held onto simplicity in other aspects of work around the office. She insisted that papers and newsletters be formatted in large simple type — reminding me that there would be some old eyes reading our publications. The Institute’s website needed to be simple and fast enough so that people from around the globe could access it with old computers and slow internet connections. Resources, whether paper from trees or time on the internet, should be used mindfully.

Dana was a master un-puzzler. She could draw deep lessons from complex systems, but it wasn’t always easy. As she worked at pulling apart particularly hard interlocking problems, she would find other things to do — rewriting book chapters, chatting with colleagues, having tea, playing with office babies — saying the answer hadn’t gone “clunk” yet. But all that time she was mentally tugging at the parts of the puzzle until the pieces finally did separate and reveal the underlying pattern. Then she would ask “why?” Why did the system develop the way it did? Who benefited? One year her students gave her a rubber stamp with the word “Why?” because she wrote it on their papers so much. She enjoyed asking the deep questions of the systems she studied — and she celebrated that same care and craftsmanship in others, whether it was in research or plumbing.

And Dana was brave. She would speak her mind — a trait I think she learned from her mother, Phebe. Speaking her mind gave her work an edge. Her opinions were bold and clear. She was unforgiving of politicians who didn’t hold to principles. And she had the courage to tell scientists and engineers that love is a resource we need to tap in creating a sustainable world.

Part way through writing this piece, my older daughter found me.
“Mommy, what are you doing?”
“Writing about Dana.”
“Is it sad?”
“Yes — and hard. I don’t know how to write what I am trying to say.”

How does a fish describe the water? So much of what I think about every day has been shaped by working with Dana.

Twelve years ago — when I started working for Dana — I had just finished a Master’s degree in forest ecology. I had spent the previous three years studying soil and plant chemistry. I had other disparate interests — ecological restoration, peace, justice, bioremediation, architecture, ecological design. Working with Dana, first on the Environmental Systems textbook and later on Beyond the Limits, gave me a framework that held all those interests and more. She encouraged me to become engaged in other subjects. I credit Dana with being the only person who could ever get me interested in economics. Because she showed how economics and ecology both fit within a larger system, I now see that I cannot care about ecology without also caring about economics.

Looking Back…And Forward

by Betty Miller

Although I had a professional and personal relationship with Dana Meadows for over twenty years, I’ve been struck by the impact Dana had on those who never met her. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard from a number of them in recent weeks, maybe it’s because I can relate to the feeling that with Dana gone, many feel even more compelled to do their part to make this world better. I’m not surprised to hear this from the people who knew Dana; I am impressed at how this seems to be a common theme among folks who merely knew her through her writing. This in itself is a beautiful tribute to Dana and all those newspaper columns she wrote. More scholarly people read her books; common citizens were addicted to her newspaper columns. People indeed were listening. And now more than ever, they’re motivated to do more than listen. Dana not only touched hearts and minds and lives, she transformed them.

Dana spoke for many of us. We looked forward to hearing week after week, year after year her interpretation of large and small events, the consequences of our actions, about current trends and indicators. She reminded us that what we do as individuals, really does add up. Through her own actions, she inspired readers to follow. Some of her best-received articles were on the simple things in life, but even in the more complex ones, she never gave up hope. She kept giving her readers ideas and optimism and encouragement. Their consciousness has been raised, now many are ready to take on some of those challenges themselves. Dana uncovered the truth; many now feel empowered to step out of their safe, comfortable surroundings and really live the truth they’ve come to know.

My own relationship with Dana had a foundation of trust. She was the visionary, the leader, the dreamer. She didn’t want to deal with the logistics, the little things necessary to carry out those dreams. Like most bookkeepers and some administrators, I tend to be meticulous and enjoy the details. I get satisfaction from quietly helping visionaries fulfill their dreams. As we got to know each other better over the years, and certainly after my office moved from down the hall to an adjacent town, our actual contact decreased. But the depth of our mutual understanding increased. Dana gave me little supervision; for the most part we agreed what my role was and I just did it. Most of my work, particularly the financial side of things, was pretty routine anyway.

Periodically I’d prepare a document for Dana’s signature. While handing it to her, I’d briefly start to explain what it was. She’d sign it and hand it back. Sometimes I’d ask her if she didn’t want to read it. “Nah,” she’d say, “I trust you.” Then we’d compare notes on how that really wasn’t such a good idea. She told me about people she knew whose bookkeepers cheated them, and I told her that it happened to my brothers. But in the end, she still didn’t want to know the details of the tax return or whatever document she’d just signed. I honored the trust she had in me.

We planned a lot of Balaton Group meetings together; Dana pulling together the substance, me dealing with logistics. I don’t know how many times she’d call me up and say something like, “you’re going to kill me, but I’ve invited another person to the meeting … and I promised we’d pay the costs.” This used to drive me crazy, at least in the beginning, because usually when she did this, we already had more participants lined up than we could accommodate and we didn’t have the funds in hand to support what we’d already committed. But somehow it always worked out. A few participants would cancel and Dana would usually be the one to find the money, or it would somehow appear.

Back in the early days of the Balaton Group, we received a series of grants from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation to support exchange programs within the group. We, in turn, granted the money in small amounts usually to support the travel expenses of one member to visit the center of another member in order to work on a joint project or in some way learn from each other. During the first year, 1986, Dana and I organized a twoweek organic agriculture tour in the US, from coast to coast, for six Hungarian scientists. In the midst of the planning, Dana surprised me by saying she’d like me to go on the tour. She said she needed help being tour guide. That was hardly the case; by the time the Hungarians arrived in New York, all the logistics had been worked out. It was clear to me that Dana did not need my help moving this group from place to place nor in the simple act of paying for hotel bills and such. This was her heart coming into play. She knew that I was an avid organic gardener and would just love the opportunity to be a part of the wonderful event I had helped organize. To this day I treasure that experience.

Donella In Memorium

by Bert de Vries

Every day since Dana passed away I have been saying farewell in one way or another. Sometimes because someone asks for the Sustainable Development Indicators book, sometimes because I encounter one of Dana’s emails in my mailbox, but mostly in confrontation with my disbelief that she is no longer with us. None of these days I have been in the mood or able to give words to it. Since 1987 every year I retreat for three-days in a zen meditation in an abbey near the Belgian border. These za-zen sesshins are a treasure to me. I decided to dedicate this one to Dana. In a way it is the best I can offer.

Some 20 monks are living in this monastery, much less than fifty years ago, but on the rise again. The abbot started zen-meditation in the 1970s in an attempt to bridge religions. The small chapel in which we have the sesshin – the zendo — has become a sacred place, a home to me. I had my fiercest battles here and I know the figures in the wooden planking better than anything in my own house. For three days each of us is a member of a group of 25 people, silently sitting for five hours a day. Gradually, we enter the here-and-now, a space which always exists and yet has to be found in an arduous process nicely summarized by “flee, be silent and rest”. Life gradually gets an immediateness of experiences: a bird singing, someone coughing, a radiator ticking, pain in a back muscle, steps on the stairs. The more difficult part are the never-stopping thoughts which make up huge chains with fascinating patterns, the inner chatterbox. Right: don’t fight, just watch.

There is another reason why this place is sacred to me. The monks provide most of their food on their own farm, next to the abbey. As long as I come here, food is vegetarian, healthy and frugal; all waste flows are recycled; heating and lighting are modest but sufficient; water-saving showerheads have been introduced long ago. Building this abbey was once a vision, too – the word sustainability was unknown. The motivation was the search for God, in contemplation and selfless service to the poor and the ignorant.

The buildings are surrounded by patches of forest and by large, industrialized farms which are one of the hallmarks of industrialization. I used to walk between the rows of beeches, ever changing with the seasons and majestically rising like a gate to heaven. Once again it becomes painfully clear that this monastery is an oasis: the forests are now closed by the Ministry of Agriculture to minimize the risk of animals getting the mouthand claw-disease which is deeply disturbing the European food system.

Obviously, in this way 16 million people cannot be fed – but it is vitally important that these traces of the past are sustained as experiments in an unsettling present and for an unknown future. One lesson I learnt here: these places are everywhere and yet they cannot be copied, imitated, globalized. They are what they are because of the people: unique, diverse, honest in their intentions. And during the last 4-5 years Balaton Group members, foremost Dana, have become more and more interested in this kind of experiments. But I’ll come back to that.

When asked to write a few words in commemoration of Dana, I thought this might be the right place. Is it? Well, no and yes. If you enter the here-and-now, there is past nor future anymore. So the answer is no. Thoughts start to swerve around nervously, without coherence. Emotions rise and fall like the eternal tide. But later on, it starts to settle down, slowly, and memories start surfacing. Memories get a different quality; they no longer have to be recollected, they present themselves, sometimes with great immediacy and less coloured by choice, judgment, expectation. They may differ quite a lot from what the conscious mind remembers or wishes to remember. So the answer is yes.

Every night at 20.00 h, the last service of the day starts. The bells ring, the monks start singing. At the end of these Day Closure services, all lights are switched off except one which lights a statue of Mother Maria high up in front of the church. The monks sing a beautiful song of devotion to her. Then, one of the monks will ring the bells, three times three. I remember Dana, standing in the doorway of her room in Foundation Farm, telling me with great enthusiasm how she started to learn bell-ringing and how much she loved it – a great surprise for me to hear. Bell ringing – it seemed only the physical manifestation of something she had been doing for over 30 years: ringing the bells for those who ignore so many of the signs telling us that we mistreat the earth and her inhabitants.

Dana had chosen not to be a biological mother but surely a mother she was for many of us in the Balaton Group and, undoubtedly, for many others as well. When Malcolm Slesser first introduced me to the Balaton Group, I was surprised and charmed by Dana’s radiant, compassionate and motherly commitment to a better world. I remember the rational and scientific part in me saying no, it’s pathetic, it’s irrational, it’s futile, it’s american and the like – and yet I would feel immersed, healed, cleansed, inspired, supported by it year after year. I always felt that this is the true expression of what Pisces have to offer the world: a vision of a better world which grows out of compassion with those beings who suffer.

At the same time she had a joyous curiosity and a willingness to doubt and reconsider. She would make any topic interesting by turning it around like a diamond, and with a childlike happiness discover new facets, new ways to look at it – which invariably led to penetrating and new insights and vistas for those involved. To me, these qualities of Dana were a large part of what made each Annual Meeting of the Balaton Group a special event.

In April 1996 we organized a workshop in the Netherlands, about Indicators for Sustainable Development. It was a topic which had the interest of many Balaton Group members. Alan AtKisson did a project on it; Hartmut Bossel was writing a book about it. RIVM was willing to host the workshop and it became a very lively, creative, productive three days. However, the ‘enduring’ and tangible result of it was Dana’s Report to the Balaton Group entitled Indicators and Information Systems for Sustainable Development. Published in September 1998, after lots of discussions, by The Sustainability Institute, Vermont. I still consider it one of the best texts on the subject. It is not about integration, it is integration. She managed to present the full richness of the concept and of the discussions in a most readable and transparant way. The mix of well-chosen examples, the mentioning of different viewpoints, the disciplined yet daring lines of thought, the sustained effort to keep all sides in – they are all evidence of her exceptional talent to deal with the full richness of reality in an intelligent, inspiring way. It is also what made the Balaton Bulletin so enjoyable to read.

The workshop was very much Balaton-spirited. I remember quite well that Alan sang his GDP-song for the first time, having composed it on the way from his high-GDP-hotel to RIVM. We all enjoyed it enormously. And I still tell on occasion the example of the qualityof-life indicators. Whereas the rich westerners suggested the number of policemen per 1000 inhabitants – the higher the better, our participant from Africa agreed with the indicator but with a reverse sign: the lower the better. Just the other day I read that in Nigeria five policemen were sentenced to death after having been found guilty of setting fire to a minibus with six people inside four of whom were killed.

Of course, not everyone liked Dana’s style, views, convictions: there was much emotional appeal to it, much personal truth in it. Her speech given at the presentation of the dutch translation of Beyond the Limits, in 1992 at RIVM, not only reflected the authors’ fears but also her hopes and visions of what was implied in the subtitle: Confronting Global Collapse. To her, the essence of the book was in the last chapter which emphasized the need for sustainability-oriented networks, for speaking the truth, for a willingness to learn, and for love. I was surprised and shocked to hear after Dana’s presentation that quite a few people — mostly old[er], white males, I can add — had not enjoyed her presentation at all. At the thought of this, I happen to read in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna reply to Arjuna’s question “what are the forces that bind us to selfish deeds?”: desire, fear and anger. I may be particularly sensitive to this because I lost a few times in my life the precarious balance between emotional commitment and intelligent enquiry on the one hand, and indifference and cynicism on the other. “You? You’re not even an economist!” I hear myself say in a jest.

I enormously enjoyed and benefited from Dana’s insights in systems functioning. I learned a lot from her way of teaching those insights – and discovered that I had to do it my way. As I see it, the food chain project Dana and her colleagues did – and do — at the Sustainability Institute is among the finest applied systems dynamics I can think of. It is a synthesis of systems thinking and participation of people with real-world motives and values and considerations – again synthesis, such an important quality of Dana’s work. I imagine it will be this kind of research that enlarges our understanding of the relation between money and materials, and I hope the Institute will continue it with Dana’s inspiration as a guide.

In February 1998 I visited Dana at the Foundation Farm near Dartmouth. We had a great time as I had a chance to have students play the climate game Susclime and take beautiful walks. And I understood what she meant when she introduced herself as “I’m a farmer” – having known her for so long as a gifted journalist by training and an inquisitive scientist by nature. One morning we drove to Hartland Four Corners – I remember crossing a river – and Dana showed me the valley she and a couple of friends had just bought. Here her dream would come true: create a community of people who would live the life we talked about so often. She was so confident, enthusiastic.

In the monastery where I am now, the rules during the zen-sesshins are simple. You are silent, also during the meals; you join in doing the dishes and preparing the table (but the food is prepared by the monks); upon leaving you clean your room; and you follow the general rules of the abbey and the program. These simple ‘adult’ rules work here, with minor adaptations in the last 10-15 years. But each community has to experiment itself with what works and what does not work, whether and when change is needed or not.

Since 1996 we have had discussions in the Balaton Group about which way to go — for the first time explicitly during a Steering Committee meeting in autumn 1997 in Joan Davis’ house. I remember I hadn’t had so much fun for a long time, as we worked out the various possibilities: the 20th Anniversary Fade-Out (still an option), Keep On Truckin’, and also The Balaton Sustainable Living Centers Network being “communities in several parts of the world that are working to build and live sustainably, each coupled with a small research/ activist/education center, all coupled in networks of personnel exchange”, in Dana’s words in the Balaton Bulletin of Winter 1998. The discussion reached a climax with Aromar Revi’s memorable list of 10 options (Balaton Bulletin Fall 1999) including such beautiful ones as Rich Old Geesers and its sister variant Rich Old Ladies; the Second Foundation Chateau not unlike the previous ones but with premium space for old geezers and discounted options for young geezers; Freddie Fungus and its B2-antipode Small is Beautiful; Sustainable Transformation Consulting Network; and finally the Systems (Hermit) Ecologists totem with the postmodern name Creative Destruction & Self-Organisation.

… And She Is Still Up!

by Wim Hafkamp

Dana stood up. She walked over towards the overhead projector in the small meeting room, arranged her presentation material on the table, and made one step back into the room. She planted her feet firmly on the ground, straightened her back, and looked up. Actually, it seemed like she was looking at a point above us, on the opposite wall. She was concentrating, focusing, finding her opening sentence. And then she started to speak, looking at us, addressing us, each and every one of us in person. She spoke to us with a directness that I had never experienced before. No filters, no static, no difficult grammar and vocabulary. And it just didn’t matter at all that many of us were not native English speakers. Dana spoke with mind & heart, body & soul. That is my first recollection of Dana in Balaton Group Meeting.

“There is enough, there is plenty! Water, Food, Energy, ………..if only we were able to use it more wisely, and more equitably”. It was my first Balaton Group Meeting. Until then I had not been aware that Meadows were two. I had read Limits to Growth some 10 years before, in the mid seventies. And here I was, 1984, in Hotel Petrol (an irony yet to be written up) in Csopak, Hungary. I had been to many conferences, workshops and meetings, whether academic, policy, activist or other. Also, I had heard good speakers, and seen effective presentations. Yet Dana was different. Sure, the content of her presentation was good. It was on carrying capacity, sustainable yield, and sustainable development. The mind was excellent. With it came her heart. There were a joy and warmth in her voice that I had never heard in conferences and workshops. It wasn’t just heart & mind. Especially now, almost 17 years later, I have this striking recollection of the first time I met Dana. She brought more: body & soul . Her composure, the way she moved, when addressing us, when engaging us in a dialogue, they were inspirational. In a literal meaning of the word, Dana inspired us. Not just at meetings of the Balaton Group, outside meetings as well, and not just in 1984, but also before and after.

Dana Meadows at Dartmouth College

By James F. Hornig

I first met Dana in 1972, when her husband Dennis was being interviewed for a possible teaching position in the Engineering School at Dartmouth. I was Dean of the Science Faculty, and had been told that “Mrs. Meadows” (how times have changed!) was also interested in a position at Dartmouth. I agreed to meet with her, and noted my reactions to colleagues in a letter I wrote to several departments:

Dr. Meadows is interested in a teaching position at Dartmouth. I bring her to your attention since her background does not readily suggest that any single department would be a logical place for her to seek a position. I met Mrs. Meadows for about an hour, and would say that I was very favorably impressed by her potential as a teacher. Would you contact me if you feel that there is any likelihood that your department would be interested in exploring Mrs. Meadow’s qualifications and interests in more detail?

Fortunately I made the right decision and we created a position for Dana in the brand new program in Environmental Studies that I had helped start. This was probably the best decision I ever made as dean. Within a matter of weeks, as her presence became known, four or five different departments expressed strong interest in inviting her to teach for them.

And thus began a twenty nine year association with Dana which was never dull and which enriched my life in countless ways.

At this earliest stage of our association, I found Dana’s work interesting, but I was a chemist doing a temporary turn of duty as an administrator, so matters of the environment and sustainability had limited meaning for me. Earth Day was a recent happening, and Limits to Growth was just being published, so I was certainly not alone in my ignorance. Four years later, when my cycle as an administrator was finished, my perspective had changed greatly. As I prepared to return to full time faculty status, I had read Limits, and had gotten to know Dana and her work much better, with the result that casting my lot with the fledgling Environmental Studies Program appeared much more attractive than returning to the Chemistry Department. My education in matters of sustainability then began in earnest.

I had one more memorable administrative encounter with Dana after I became chair of the Environmental Studies Program. Dana had, in due course, been promoted to a tenured faculty position (an event which seemed to impress her not at all) but after a few years she walked into my office and announced that she was going to resign her tenure status, while continuing to teach as an untenured adjunct member of the faculty. I had no previous experience dealing with that sort of request, so I asked her to tell me more. Her logic was that she never wanted to take on what she felt were the obligations of a tenured position. In particular she never wanted to take her turn as chair of the department or serve on uninteresting committees, and she wanted freedom to adjust her teaching responsibilities from time to time when other activities attracted her attention. I explained that though unusual, such considerations were not necessarily incompatible with tenure. Moreover, I explained, Dartmouth had relatively recently begun admitting women undergraduate students and her position as one of only a few tenured woman faculty members was important as a role model for the students. We argued, and I asked her to think about it for a few days before making a final decision. Predictably, she did not change her mind, and her request was duly processed through the very skeptical administrative channels, and granted. Contrary to my apprehensions, though, her action did not damage the emerging image of professional women faculty at Dartmouth one bit; quite the contrary, it was recognized and widely admired as a self confident assertion of independence. This was another in the long series of lessons I learned from Dana.

I chaired the Environmental Studies department for about a dozen years, and had the pleasure of watching and learning from Dana’s immediate and continuing success as a teacher, while marveling at her evolving interests in journalism and international networking. As a teacher, she had a remarkable skill of being able to establish almost instant rapport with audiences of all sizes and interests. Her lecture notes, if any, were sparse, but she quickly communicated an intense and contagious interest in her subject to the audience. She never talked down to students, always communicating a sense of mutual intellectual challenge and involvement, and students invariably rose to the challenge of trying to perform at a level beyond their own expectations. For Dana, teaching was not an abstract process — it involved intense engagement with the world. Two examples:

Dana helped design a project course that was to serve as a culminating experience for students before graduation. The class of 15 or 20 students was assigned a real-life local environmental issue and asked to analyze the situation, identify policy options, and make a recommendation. For her first offering of the course Dana chose a controversial regional issue. A large paper company had indicated an interest in identifying a small community in our area where it could build a new paper mill. Dana asked the class to analyze the impact of a new paper mill on a typical small community like Hanover. Under Dana’s guidance, the class was led to approach the problem in the role of a professional consulting group serving a typical community being approached by the company. They quickly understood that this was not a sterile class exercise when she informed them that at the end of the course, they would report their conclusions at a well publicized public presentation, as well as in a written report. They investigated the company’s past performance, visited a mill the company had constructed recently, and examined everything from sustainable employment prospects to impacts on roads and schools. The resulting written report was distributed widely to communities in the area, and the oral presentation was televised and viewed throughout the state. (The paper mill eventually went elsewhere.) This typified the style of her teaching — she was never satisfied to teach about something, she wanted students to be ready to get involved and make something happen. Some years later she instituted a course called “Environmental Journalism” and again demonstrated her focus on doing by insisting on the unique requirement that before receiving credit for completing the course, students had to submit evidence that one of their written journalistic exercises had been accepted somewhere for publication, or that they had received five rejection slips!

Probably it was because of Dana’s passion for changing the world that Dartmouth never fully lived up to her aspirations. Shortly after she and Dennis arrived at Dartmouth, Dennis, with Dana’s assistance, initiated a new research and master’s level teaching program at the Engineering School called the Resource Policy Center. The program, which focused on applied systems analysis produced a remarkable group of well trained and highly successful graduates, but despite its success, it was eventually abandoned by the Engineering School as faculty and administrative priorities changed. This was a great disappointment to both Dana and Dennis. Even more frustrating for Dana was that the fact that over the same period she was instrumental in cooperating with some social scientists in designing an interdisciplinary Policy Studies program for undergraduates. Despite its success with students, and through no fault of Dana’s, that program, too, was discontinued, largely because of the difficulty of generating long term cooperation among departments. Academia can be very conservative, and these disappointments must have led Dana to question the commitment of the institution to the new ideas of systems thinking and sustainability she championed so passionately. But perhaps it was too much for her to hope that more than one new interdisciplinary program — the Environmental Studies Program — could take root simultaneously at Dartmouth.

Several years into my first job after college, I found myself feeling lost amidst the challenges of environmental work. Around that time, Dana came to visit our organization to deliver her Beyond the Limits talk. I had been a student of Dana’s at Dartmouth, so she pulled me aside several hours before the address, put her arm around my shoulder, and asked about my career and life.

Making Sense of the Death of Dana Meadows

By Vicki Robin

In the process of losing Dana Meadows I have moved through many spaces. While she struggled to live I lived in the space of fierce prayer for her total recovery. I also entered the space of indignation that this could happen to her, to me, to all of us. In those days I wrote:

IN US ALL THINGS POSSIBLE
The you-in-me and the me-in-you
The two of us in the “we” of the world
In this alone in my simple heart
All has been possible, all will be healed.
And you-and-me in the “us” of our friends
Bright lights of hope all the world wide
This family of grit, of smarts and of heart
It’s this “we” that will mend what’s now come apart.

After the news of her death I spent several days in the helpless sadness of a motherless child. That has passed, and I now find myself in a space of metaphor and meaning making. Some people wring their hands. I write. So here is what I find myself thinking about. . .

The Systemic Crashes Dana Spent 30 Years Warning Us About

Dana was strong in body and will. She’d staved off the Dartmouth winter flu until a little relaxation allowed the whole dump to descend on her body. But she had papers to grade and an institute to run and spring to plan for and… It was all too much to do yet all too central to who she was to let go of. Besides, she loved it all and wasn’t about to stop. So an unsustainable state built up in her body, and she didn’t intervene. Then one small thing went wrong. Something no one ever suspects will happen. None of us think a flu will infect our Eustachian tubes and the infection will go into our brains. Once the meningitis — the brain infection — was underway, a cascade of effects happened with terrifying speed. She went into a coma. From baking bread and slurping cream, she was suddenly tubed and doped up at a hospital she hated.

Two of the most powerful interventions known to men and women were marshaled — antibiotics and prayer. She couldn’t have had better treatments on either level. But the system had gone too far towards crashing, and she could not live. If she had been hit by a truck or died of a cancer known to have environmental causes — well, we would have a single villain to blame. But she died of the tipping of complex and completely natural systemic forces — the same thing she had been saying we were doing to the living mantle of this earth. The earlier we intervene in such a process, the lighter the touch can be and the more successful the outcome.

In calling us for 30 years to pay attention to the indicators of impending system crash, she never lost faith that we could and would intervene. She believed fully in natural goodness and possibility.

There is no one to blame for her passing. Not the bacteria, who are, after all, our allies in sustaining the world. Not Dana for inattention to her health. Not us for failing to love or appreciate her — the circle of sadness that now mourns around the world knew they had a treasure in Dana. Not the institutions for failing to listen to her — indeed, the medical institution did its very best, and everyone was grateful for that efficient system that it seemed might save her.

There is no blame, only profound lessons to be learned. One is this tragic demonstration of how small — indeed microscopic — changes in a system can bring the whole thing to its knees. We need to be humble in contemplation of this truth of our world. We never know what small step unleashes horror — or healing. We must be awake. We must hold life, every moment and minutiae of it, as precious. Dana did not live a cautious life. She risked, big time. The lesson is not to contract. But if our stride outstrips our awareness, we are cautioned that we might tip some balance towards cataclysm. By the same token, if our awareness outstrips our stride, we might be miraculous forces for turning the tide toward ultimate health.

The other lesson I am living with is that if a thriving, flourishing, joyful, sustainable way of life is to emerge on this earth, and if I am committed to it emerging through me, then I need to take care of myself. I am a vital part of the community of life. To ignore my own well-being in service to the well-being of the whole is, ultimately, no service to anyone. I want the entire leadership of this big, bosomy, bright movement towards healthy ways of living on earth to be around for many decades. In contemplating Dana leaving us, I tried listing people like her. There were none. Each leader is unique and essential. We need to take care of ourselves and to feed our life energy to the next generation while we do our work in the now.

The Nurse Log

Years ago a friend took several of us to the rain forest for a guided walk. He asked us to be silent while we were hiking and to notice what we saw in the absence of thought or chatter. I saw death — and it was good and necessary. I saw that the living forest was rooted in and depended on the sacrifice of generations of ancestor life. It lived off rotting carcasses of trunks and roots and leaves and even animals. The very exchange of minerals at the tiny root hairs depended on the dissolution of former living beings. Instead of a forest, I saw the cycle of matter through living and dying. Let me tell you, it was not an easy share when we circled up in our clearing to talk!

I have walked many times in the rain forest here in the Northwest. One of my constant joys is coming upon colonnades of cedars — their straight lines defying the random patterns of nature. Once mature, there is no evidence of the “hand” that planted them in a perfect row. But the young ones still sit atop their mothers’ backs tell the story. When a great tree falls, its decomposing trunk becomes home first to fungi, the great decomposers. Those break down the taut flesh of the tree, making space for roots to lodge and liberating nutrients for them to feed. Soon a line of saplings are growing, sending larger roots around the trunk to suckle from the soil itself. As the mother log disintegrates, the young trees are often left standing on long legs of roots. These eventually thicken into trunk itself, and all that’s left of the sacrificial act of the mother releasing her body to the next generation is the way her young line up forever at her grave. Dana’s physical body, which held together her other body — the body of intelligence, inspiration, integrity and love — has been toppled by the winds of change. We who loved her — whether or not we knew her — will flourish as we sink ourselves even deeper into the body of work she left behind. May we grow tall and straight. May the sunlight that’s entered the forest through her falling call us to unimaginable heights. May future generations, walking in the healthy, fertile land we will leave behind, marvel at how true we have been to our mother — without ever needing to know her name.

Novas

Our sun, and consequently all life on earth, was seeded by a previous star maturing to a point of heat where nuclear fusion reactions began. This process, in the largest stars, led to cascading effects resulting in eventual collapse and an explosion called a “supernova.” It is a awe-ful event, and the release of energy creates, momentarily, the brightest star in the heavens. Some of the heavier elements produced near the end of the star’s life are liberated back into the gas in the galaxy and provide some of the raw material for the next generation of stars. The intensity of shock and grief at Dana’s passing, together with the intensity of what she had in motion when death shattered her teeming world, is seeding the living with a will and inspiration for creating worlds worthy of her visions. We are her starseed. We are her children. And our children and their children are hers as well. Our living earth will be nourished, will thrive, by the elements she released into our very cells.

How Buddhists Honor Their Teachers

True spiritual teachers, even now in this money-mediated, commodified world, shun charging for their teaching. They know that the Truth belongs to no one and every one and thus cannot be sold. They know that whatever enlightenment their students may experience comes from their own diligence, their own hard work. This tradition is well expressed in the Buddhist meditation community. Students come for retreat and pay a fixed amount for room and board but are free to offer whatever donation to the teacher they see fit. This offering is called, amazingly, “dana” (pronounced like Donna). This “dana” is the heartfelt gift to a teacher who has opened the mind in insight, aroused the heart of compassion and demonstrated what a fuller spiritual life might be like. The community of people who loved Dana Meadows, in this moment, seems to be spontaneously called to ask what their “dana” to this great teacher might be. Some know full well what their path and contribution is, and they are about this journey with a lighter, yet more determined, step. They are finishing unfinished manuscripts, rearranging lectures, planting luscious gardens, meditating with greater purpose and much, much more. People in her co-housing community and her institute are bearing down on birthing her vision. Others have been inspired more generally by her to dedicate their lives to fishing humanity out of the swamp of co-stupidity we’re brewing. These folks are finding themselves more directed toward specific areas of work. This seems to be our “dana.” It would certainly please Dana to no end if her death inspired thousands to reinvigorate their vows and millions more to take up the causes she cared about. She would not want to be deified, but she would love seeing the garden of sustainability in full bloom. What is your “dana”? How much, and of what, will you give to this special teacher who opened your heart and mind and touched your soul? Our gift to her is the gift of us to the world.

The Power of the Net

Dana believed in the power of the net. By this I do mean the Internet, but there’s more. She believed in the living network of devoted and intelligent earth movers (and shakers) who’d sat in a Balaton (or other) circle with her over many decades. The spontaneous connections made in such meetings birthed projects and reports and insights and hope and even marriages and babies. She also believed, though she might not have used this term, in the Jewel Net of Indra from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Imagine a net stretching across all dimensions, endlessly through space and time. Brilliant jewels lie at each connecting point or “knot” of the net, reflecting in their infinite facets every other jewel in the net. This net, seen by the mystics, is for us a mere metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things.

Remembering Dana

by Csaba Csaki

Csaba Csaki is Professor of Agricultural Economics at Budapest University of Economics and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Policy at The World Bank.

I was shocked to hear the news of Donella’s death. Her early and unexpected passing is a terrible blow. In thinking about her, I recall many memories of working with her, and of her lively mind and spirit, and the joys she found in the intellectual exchange of ideas.

Donella Meadows: A Personal Tribute

by Seth J. Itzkan

Seth Itzkan is a futurist and the Co-director of the Boston Chapter of the World Future Society.

Yesterday we all lost a friend. Arguably the world’s greatest futurist and most responsible citizen, Donella “Dana” Meadows, lead author of the seminal work The Limits to Growth and the world’s greatest champion of systems thinking and sustainable development passed on at the untimely age of only 59. Next to Rachael Carlson’s Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth was the most influential and clarion call to modern environmentalism, as well as being a landmark achievement in systems modeling and computational future studies. The result of MIT’s prestigious Systems Dynamics Group, the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 sent shock waves around the world and became a media phenomena, selling 9 million copies in 29 languages. Headlines read, “Computers look into the future and shudder”, “Study sees disaster by the year 2100”, “Scientists worn of global catastrophe”. The book unleashed a global debate that is still in force. Its popularity helped spur and proliferate the field of systems modeling and its sundry concepts, such as resource “sinks” and “sources”, positive and negative “feedback loops”, “carrying capacity”, and “systems behavior”. Today these concepts are central to environmental science and are cornerstones of the Kyoto accords on carbon dioxide reduction.

Countering the Contrarians

Since its publication, however, an army of progrowth factions have tried to debunk the book’s credibility. John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends 2000, wrote in his introduction, that The Limits to Growth was proven wrong “before the ink was dry”. Others commonly equated the work with Malthus and thus attempted to reduce it to nothing more than antiquated philosophy that was unappreciative of technology and free market forces. Such rhetoric was not unusual for capitalist who didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand the concepts of systems behavior nor the underlying realities of the global environment. Nor did such contrarians, it appears, ever care to read the works by Meadow et al, which specifically addressed the contested points. In most cases, the attackers focused on specific, and insignificant, instances where a resource stock had not been depleted at the rate forecast or where the price of a commodity had decreased instead of increased. Such anomalies were cited in an attempt to derail the whole science of long range global systems modeling. As if to say, a cool day in Kansas is a blow against the theory of global warming, and the preponderance of evidence which supports it.

Other captains of the contrarian movement included Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource, and Herman Kahn, author of The Year 2000 and The Next 200 Years. A recent recruit to this now defunct army is futurist Jerome Glenn. During a 1999 Millennial episode of the McLaughlin Group, Glenn predicted that the Club of Rome (sponsor of The Limits to Growth study) would be proved to be the “Club of Wrong”. McLaughlin, true to his form, replied that he could do better than that, and predicted that all environmentalism would finally end. Unfortunately, however, for Glenn, McLaughlin, and their ilk, the future thus far has not been cooperative (nature can sometimes be that way). Instead it brought us the “dot com” bubble burst and even more incontrovertible evidence of global environmental distress. The 20th century closed as the warmest century of the millennium, with the 1990s the warmest decade of the century, and 1998, the warmest year of record. In addition to the unprecedented fires that circled our planet at this millennial transition, we also saw massive thinning of Arctic ice and shrinkage of glaciers. If such ice were only an adornment to our planet, like rocks in a martini, it probably wouldn’t matter, but, as it turns out, the Arctic ice, in addition to keeping current sea levels in check, is also the foundation of an ecosystem which drives the oceanic food chain, starting with the microbacteria, plankton, and krill which live and feed in the nutrient rich waters just beneath it. Melt the Arctic ice and you not only flood all coastal areas where a majority of humanity lives, you also remove the food supply for marine life, from cod to shrimp to whales. Not good. The year 2000 also saw the publication of Scientific American’s cover story, “Global Warming: The Hidden Health Risk” which documented the world wide expansion of vector born diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever, hantavirus, and cholera. The article forecast that by the year 2100, due to increased warming, the zone of potential malaria transmission would have expanded to an area inclusive of 60 percent of humanity. And I thought technology was supposed to rid us of these problems.

In hindsight, contrarian arguments are just hot air and obfuscation. We now know that the earth is warming at an accelerating rate and is doing in no small part from anthropomorphic influences. This is no longer just a team of computer geeks at MIT making such prognostications, but the collective conclusion of thousands of the worlds’ leading scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), though attempting to use cautious language, is becoming increasing ardent in its messages. Their plausible scenarios being offered for the next 50 years are startling. Given contemporary information, The Limits to Growth was not only accurate, it was conservative. The real situation is getting worse, faster.

Poetic Justice — Vindication of The Limits to Growth

Perhaps, there is a fitting irony in that in the week of Donella’s unfortunate passing, the IPCC published the summary findings of their third assessment report (TAR) which, in its totality, fully vindicates The Limits to Growth and confirms many of its findings and arguments almost to the letter. They state:

“Projected climate changes during the 21st century have the potential to lead to future large-scale and possibly irreversible changes in Earth systems resulting in impacts at continental and global scales…Examples include significant slowing of the ocean circulation that transports warm water to the North Atlantic, large reductions in the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, accelerated global warming due to carbon cycle feedback in the terrestrial biosphere, and releases of terrestrial carbon from permafrost regions and methane from hydrates in the coastal sediments”.

Other IPCC projected impacts, which could be lifted right out of The Limits to Growth, include: “reduction in potential crop yields”, “decreased water availability”, “increase in the number of people exposed to vector-borne diseases”, “widespread increase in the risk of flooding”, and “increased energy demand for space cooling”.

Along the economic front, the IPCC report states: “The costs of ordinary and extreme weather events have increased rapidly in recent decades. Global economic losses from catastrophic events increased 10.3 fold…(between the 1950s and 1990s in 1999 US$)”. Stating further, such continued trends would “…trigger increased insurance costs, slow the expansion of financial services into developing countries, reduce the availability of insurance for spreading risk, and increase the demand for government-funding compensation following natural disasters”.

Almost 30 years ago, Meadows et al came under fire for stated exactly such environmental and economic scenarios. The costs of environmental loss would inevitably cut into capital flows and investments. Its all there in the systems models which the contrarians refused to look at. Their continued reticence, even today, is like the Spanish Inquisition’s refusal to look through Galileo’s telescope. At stake is a paradigm. Science be dammed.

Perhaps, however, the most fitting tribute to the legacy of Donella Meadows in the IPCC report is in their description for how to lessen the potential impacts of climate change.

“Policies that lessen pressures on resources, improve management of environmental risks, and increase the welfare of the poorest members of society can simultaneously advance sustainable development and equity, enhance adaptive capacity, and reduce vulnerability to climate and other stresses”.

Exactly the measures which Meadows has been preaching for over quarter of a century. And exactly what big government, pro-growth, and World Bank friendly forces do not want to hear.

Consummate Global Citizen

For the majority of the years since The Limit to Growth, Donella focused her energies on promoting a positive vision of the future, through such avenues as sustainable development and her weekly column “The Global Citizen”. The philosophy and practice of sustainable development, which has now taken hold worldwide, is largely due to her. Its tenets are first outlined in The Limits to Growth, but under slightly different terminology. Defining appropriate “feedback mechanisms” for a sustainable state, she expounds on several ideas, such that, “…the total costs of pollution and resource depletion be included in the price of a product, or that every user of river water be required to place his intake pipe downstream from his effluent pipe”.

Those ideas are now at the heart of “ecological economics” and central to modern pillars of the sustainability movement, such as Ray Anderson’s “Mid Course Correction” and Bill McDonough’s “Eco-effective” design principles. Countering the argument that such a state of limited growth is akin to death, as her detractors often huffed, Donella states, “Population and capital are the only quantities that need be constant…Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely. In particular, those pursuits that many people would list as the most desirable and satisfying…”

Continuing,

“…global equilibrium need not mean an end to progress or human development. The possibilities within an equilibrium state are almost endless. …It is possible that new freedoms might also arise — universal and unlimited education, leisure for creativity and inventiveness, and, most important of all, the freedom from hunger and poverty enjoyed by such a small fraction of the world’s people today”.

The Creation of the Balaton Group

by Dennis Meadows

Central Concerns

The essential elements of the Balaton Group and its meetings today were already in place from the beginning. The October 1982 Balaton Bulletin described our first meeting.

“In September 1982 thirty scientists and managers met in Hungary to review the state of the art of natural resources modeling and to identify ways we could advance the theory and the practice of regional resource management. Those attending the meeting wanted to identify ways of supporting each other in the design and implementation of policies that:

greatly raise the productivity of each region’s natural resource endowment and

 maintain or increase its overall fertility.”

 Jane King attended that meeting, and the Bulletin mentioned her work:

“We were inspired by a statement written by Jane King that expresses the general viewpoint we all share:

“Any nation has at a given time a range of potential futures, some acceptable, others not, depending on the combination of its resource endowments, demographic circumstances, the skills and socio-cultural attributes of its population, available technologies, and trading opportunities with the outside world. The problem is to find a means of defining that future which is in the best interests of a country; and in this the concept of carrying capacity can provide a helpful point of departure.”

Dana was already fascinated by the role of paradigms in scientific advance and social change. She wrote in the Bulletin:

“Any scientific field can be defined by its ‘warranted queries’ the questions that are sanctioned for investigation by the field’s practitioners and that are accessible to its methods. The Balaton meeting identified several general questions that will serve as the framework for our efforts.

1. What is the current maximum sustainable use of the resource base: nationally, regionally, globally?
2. How could the sustainable output be increased?
3. What is the cost of exceeding the sustainable level? What is the cost of not exceeding the sustainable level?
4. What are the ways of facilitating the transition to more extensive reliance on renewable resources?
5. What are the likely future consequences of unequal distribution of the world’s resources?
6. How may the carrying capacity be affected by social and economic development?
7. How can our understanding of the answers to any of these questions be most effectively communicated to other scientists and to decisions makers.”

Those seven questions remain at the heart of our members’ concerns.

It is no accident that the goals, the meeting design, and even many of the participants from those early meetings still serve us well today. It is no coincidence either that the Group members have produced an enormous collection of useful research, reports, books, conferences; they have even engineered the creation of new institutes, university curricula, and philanthropic programs. And it is not surprising that many Balaton Group members have been boosted to positions of national and international influence through their participation in our sessions.

It was our intention from the first to accomplish precisely those outcomes. The Balaton Group emerged from a deliberate and extended discussion between Dana and me, with many suggestions from our friends, about the best way we could stimulate world wide research, teaching, and policy on the problems identified by our work for the Club of Rome.

My objective here is to describe briefly the origins of the Group and some of its distinguishing features. My focus is on the institutional history and on Dana’s role in the early years. I will not trace the intellectual development, professional accomplishments, and changing themes of our assemblies. That story is told already in the 2000 accumulated pages of the Balaton Bulletin. Some day it will be useful to condense that narrative into a succinct summary. I leave that to another time.

The Balaton Group embodies several important innovations in its operation; and it has been unusually long-lived and productive. How did all this come about?

Kapolyi’s Invitation

In 1979 Dana Meadows received an invitation to participate in a UNESCO conference to be held in Budapest. During that period she refused most speaking invitations, but we both had positive impressions of the city and several friends there. So Dana accepted. The meeting was held at a lovely hotel on Margit’s Island in the Danube. After her speech, Dana was approached by a distinguished Hungarian, Dr. Laszlo Kapolyi. He invited her to lunch and then used that meeting to discuss with her opportunities for collaboration.

At that time Dr. Kapolyi was the senior government official responsible for the energy sector in Hungary. He had two earned doctorates — in economics and in engineering, and he was enthusiastic about the potential for using mathematical modeling to enhance policy making in Hungary.

Although Hungary had always been the most open and free of the countries under Soviet sway, nevertheless, in the 70s it was still a society in which travel and information were under fairly tight, government control. Kapolyi understood the costs of isolating Hungary’s best minds from their counterparts abroad, and he hoped to increase their opportunities for collaboration. To Dana he expressed a general interest in supporting some sort of East-West scientific cooperation related to modeling of energy, resources, and development.

Dana promised to think about it. She returned home, and we discussed the offer at length. Shortly thereafter, she and I organized a second and then a third visit to Kapolyi in Budapest to discuss further his interests and his offer. Kapolyi’s interests were non political and his resources were significant. So we took it as an important opportunity. But how to respond?

Main Influences

Looking back two decades, I can identify four important influences on the design of the conference that Dana and I conceived as a response to Dr. Kapolyi’s invitation.

First of all was the worldwide collection of friends and colleagues that we met through our association with the Limits to Growth project and book. Dana preferred to stay home and write. So, in those days, I mainly took responsibility for dealing with speaking invitations and the other requests for collaboration that came from people around the world who were excited about our analysis and eager to learn more or do more about it. In the 1970s I visited over 25 nations to speak, consult, and teach about the limits to global growth. From those trips I gained a good impression for the state of the art related to resource modeling and to sustainable development. I also accumulated a massive address book of talented analysts and teachers. That list was the starting point for discussions about who should come to the first meeting.

Second was the winter that Dana and I spent as Research Fellows at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, just south of Vienna. From January to March 1976 Dana joined the Food Group, and I worked with the Energy Group. That visit gave the opportunity for our first visit to Hungary, and it introduced us to several Hungarians who played a central role in the early days of the Balaton Group. At IIASA we met Ferenc Rabar, Csaba Csaki, and Istvan Lang who became eventually Minister of Finance, President of the Karl Marx University, and President of the Academy of Sciences respectively.

Third, was the set of two-week workshops on system dynamics and natural resources that I organized with Jørgen Randers. He and I twice applied for grants from the NATO Science Committee for financial support of an Advance Study Institute. The first was in Hannover, Germany, in 1972. Niels Meyer was a participant. With Niels’ help, Jørgen and I organized the second workshop in Kolle Kolle, Denmark in 1973. Eventually there was a third workshop in Denmark several years later. Malcolm Slesser, Chirapol Sintunawa, Joan Davis, and several other core Balaton Group members learned their first system dynamics at these meetings and formed the personal and professional relationships that eventually drew them into the Balaton Group meetings.

Fourth was the Gordon Conference series. During her days as a biophysicist at Harvard, Dana had participated several times in the annual Gordon Conference on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy applied to enzymes. Dozens of these meetings are organized every summer, each on a narrow topic in the physical or biological sciences. They involve a relatively small number of elite scientists, who attend by invitation. Organizers and participants tend to remain the same, year after year. The sessions typically take place on the campuses of small private schools in northern New England. So costs are low, and there are few distractions. The goal is to bring together the leaders in a field under conditions that permit frank and constructive discussions about the key research issues. I believe it is generally the practice to schedule formal speeches each morning and leave the afternoons available for informal, but technical discussions. The Gordon Conferences have been an enormous impetus to advancing research in the areas they address, and we consciously took over some of their features in order to create a workshop that would advance understanding of sustainability.

I am sure there were other influences as well. But suddenly, one day, our plan crystalized. I still remember the definitive conversation in our study at Foundation Farm. Dana and I agreed, “Let’s bring together our best friends, who are systems analysts involved in environment and energy, and organize a meeting with their counterparts in Hungary!”

Kapolyi was receptive to that idea, and we worked with him to arrange the first meeting in the fall of 1982.

First Meeting

Those were exciting times! Kapolyi was rising up through the ranks of the Hungarian bureaucracy. Eventually he would become Minister of Industry. He already had enormous power within his country, a talented young staff, and inspirational goals. Dana and I had just passed our 40th birthdays. The institute I had founded at Dartmouth had grown to about 50 people all engaged generally in policy modeling. Our special interest lay in energy systems, and we had contacts around the world in this area. So it was easy to identify the first set of participants in our meeting.

In August 1982 we were met by limousines at the Budapest airport, passed through the VIP lounge, and ferried off to the best hotel in town, all expenses paid. There was a private dinner in Budapest. Then buses carried us down to the Bishop’s castle in Veszprém. We had a reception and a concert and welcoming speeches. Then on to Csopak, a sleepy village on the shores of Lake Balaton. There we stayed at a small hotel, the property of the OKGT, Hungary’s oil and gas monopoly. The rest house was used intensively over the summer to give subsidized holidays to employees in the energy trust, but it was available to us in early September. It took several years for the facility to adopt the name Hotel Petrol, but it adopted us immediately. It has been the site for every one of our annual meetings.

Getting Organized

We soon incorporated the group in the United States as INRIC, The International Network of Resource Information Centers. But our popular name remained the Balaton Group. Immediately we started the practice of publishing the Balaton Bulletin four times a year, as a means of sharing professional and personal information among the members of our Group.

It was obvious from the beginning that our program would only succeed, if we could make ourselves into a real network — if we could enhance the quality, the quantity, and the speed of information exchanged among our members. The Bulletin was useful, but slow. It had to be supplemented. Initially we worked hard to ensure that members could send and receive telex messages. Soon personal computers began to find widespread use, and we helped our members to gain access to that technology — buying them a PC when that was required. Now e-mail is in widespread use. All our members have personal computers, and the internet has had an enormously constructive impact on work.

Dana and I made all the important decisions for the first few years. Then the Group elected a six member Steering Committee. It meets once a year to plan the next meeting and discuss invitations. Joan Davis has always provided exceptional hospitality for these meetings at her house near Zürich.

Membership

Total attendance in the first 19 meetings of our group was 871. The sessions have involved 342 different participants from more than 40 nations. The first meeting was our smallest. Participation was greatest in 1987 when 58 people journeyed to Csopak for our meeting. We decided that was too many for informal discussions. Since then we have let the capacity of the hotel limit our attendance to under 50. But despite the diversity in participants, it is the continuity, the persistence, and the dedication of its central members which have defined the group and made it so productive. When we come together next fall, nearly one third of the attendees will have been to more than half of the 20 meetings. A partial list of the stalwarts, in addition to Dana, is given below with the number of times they joined the sessions between 1981 and 2000.

• Joe Alcamo — 12
• Gerardo Budowski — 11
• Wim Hafkamp — 12
• Jane King — 10
• Dennis Meadows — 19
• Betty Miller — 17
• Carlos Quesada — 13
• Chirapol Sintunawa — 17
• Robert Wilkinson — 10
• Hartmut Bossel — 10
• Joan Davis — 18
• Tamas Fleischer — 10
• Zoltan Lontay — 13
• Niels Meyer — 16
• Jørgen Norgard — 16
• Aromar Revi — 12
• Bert de Vries — 16

The annual meeting was always one of the most important commitments on Dana’s calendar. She never missed a session, and, of course, she made crucial contributions to every one. It is terribly sad that she will be present next September only in our hearts.

Budget

Initially the Hungarians paid all our costs inside their country. We had to cover travel and administrative expenses. Then in the late 1980s there were major changes in Hungary’s government as there were across all of Eastern Europe. Kapolyi lost the capacity to secure resources that would pay for our meetings. The Balaton Group took over full responsibility for all the meeting costs. Dana played a key role in securing major, multiyear grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Noyes Foundation to help us make the transition to financial independence. Later she contributed her personal funds when outside donations would not suffice.

The Balaton Group has been a very cost effective enterprise. The total budget raised outside Hungary by INRIC for its meetings, administration, and special projects has been about $1 million — approximately $50,000/year. Our major expenses are travel and lodging for the annual meeting and payment for part-time administrative support. In addition contributions totaling much more than one million dollars have been raised by individual members to support implementation of the conferences, research, books, student exchanges, and other projects of their collaboration. For example, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation provided a grant to me of almost $350,000 to support Balaton Group members in their efforts to develop and disseminate an innovative new curriculum on the creation of teams for sustainable development. Bert de Vries arranged for the Dutch National Institute on Environment (RIVM) to fund a set of Balaton Group seminars on indicators of sustainable development. These two grants and many dozens of others are not included in the above total.

In a shift that illustrates much about the Hungarian economy, the 2001 meeting, our twentieth, will again be sponsored by Kapolyi. But this time he is paying from funds earned by his company.

Administration

The Balaton Group has been a virtual organization. Initially it was run out of my institute at Dartmouth. But since 1988, we have had no physical office, no office equipment, no full time staff, not even a separate postal address. Betty Miller was my administrative assistant at the Dartmouth College Resource Policy Center in the early 1980s. So we asked her to help organize the first meeting. Her assistance was invaluable, and she has provided administrative support ever since. Initially the costs of her time were paid by my institute. Now she works as an independent consultant. She maintains our central financial records and helps with the logistics of each meeting.

Everything else has been carried out by volunteers. In the early years Dana and I together authored the Balaton Bulletin. She took over sole responsibility for it around 1990. A year ago it was taken over by Nanda Gilden and Niels Meyer.

The Future

We have periodically considered whether we should disband the Balaton Group and end its annual meetings. The question arose again at the Steering Committee meeting in Zürich last February. Once again we concluded that the costs are so low, the benefits so high, and the meetings so much fun, it is important to sustain the Group.

I know that the mission, the procedures, and the membership of the Group will need to change gradually over the next few years to reflect all the changes in us and in the world since we received Kapolyi’s invitation in 1979. But the wisdom and the dedication of the current members will make that possible.

Dana’s intellect, enthusiasms, optimistic visions, and dedication to the welfare of others were a major influence on the evolution of the Balaton Group over the first twenty years. Now it is necessary for others to pick up the torch.

Messages from Friends and Colleagues Around the World

Like so many others around the world, those of us in IISD mourn the loss of this bright star of sustainability. Donella has enlightened us for so long that it is hard to believe the star has dimmed. Indeed, we hope it will not be so, for she leaves a legacy of students and followers, of publications and ideas, and inspiration of many sorts that will continue to make her presence felt for many years.

Now that she has passed on to another place, she is there in yet a new way. She is the stronger energy that prompts me to say what I think and to stand up for what I believe in. She passed away in peace because she trusts those she left behind to carry on with the work that she was a leader in. Now, in her new form, she is able to be part of so many of us, spread around the world, as vibrant energy. I was so moved to hear that the people in the Cobb Hill community sense this also. She trusts us to carry on, to do what needs to be done, and she is with us, within us.

Donella H. Meadows, known to many friends an colleagues as “Dana”, described herself as a systems analyst, journalist, college professor, international coordinator of resource management institutions, and farmer.

She was born March 13, 1941 in Elgin, Illinois, USA, and was the valedictorian and recipient of the senior science award in 1959 at Arlington High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois. She was trained as a scientist, earning a BA in chemistry, magna cum laude, from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1963 where she was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. She went on to do graduate work in biophysics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, earning a Ph.D. in 1968.

After finishing graduate school, she spent a year driving through Asia, living in villages, climbing mountains, and kayaking whitewater rivers. She often talked about this trip being as educational as any of her formal schooling.

Returning to Massachusetts, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Nutrition, MIT, and in the Center for Population Studies, Harvard University. In 1972 Donella Meadows was on the team at MIT that produced the global computer model “World3” for the Club of Rome. She was the principal author of the book The Limits to Growth (1972, Universe Books), which described that model, and which sold millions of copies in 28 languages. She was also co-author of two technical books about the global model: Toward Global Equilibrium and The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World (1973 and 1974, both MIT Press).

Subsequently, she was involved in numerous studies of social, environmental, energy, and agriculture systems. She chronicled the emerging field of global modeling in her 1981 book Groping in the Dark: the First Decade of Global Modeling (John Wiley). In a later book she criticized the state of the art of social system modeling using nine case studies (The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions, also John Wiley, 1983).

In 1985 Donella Meadows began a weekly newspaper column “The Global Citizen,” commenting on world events from a systems point of view. The column was awarded second place in the 1985 Champion-Tuck national competition for outstanding journalism in the fields of business and economics. It also received the Walter C. Paine Science Education Award in 1990 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. The column was self-syndicated and appeared in more than 20 papers. Selected columns were published as a book, also called The Global Citizen (Island Press, 1991).

Begining in 1972, Donella Meadows taught at Dartmouth College in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program and in the graduate program of the Resource Policy Center. In 1983 she resigned her tenured professorship to devote more time to international activities and writing. She retained an Adjunct Professorship at Dartmouth and taught environmental journalism and environmental ethics.

With Dennis Meadows she founded and coordinated INRIC, the International Network of Resource Information Centers (also called the Balaton Group). INRIC is a coalition of systems-oriented analysts and activists in 50 nations, all of whom work to promote sustainable, high-productivity resource management. Through INRIC Donella Meadows developed training games and workshops on resource management, which she presented in Hungary, Kenya, Costa Rica, Portugal, Singapore, Germany, and the United States. Each year she helped organize a conference in Hungary at which Balaton Group members exchange information and plan joint projects.

During 1988-90 she worked with television producers at WGBH-TV in Boston to develop the ten-part PBS series “Race to Save the Planet.” She was writing a college textbook to accompany the programs as part of an Annenberg/CPB telecourse. The book is tentatively titled A Sustainable World: an Introduction to Environmental Systems. It will be published by John Wiley.

Donella Meadows served on the Board of Directors of the Hunger Project, the Winrock International Livestock Research Center, the Trust for New Hampshire Lands, the Upper Valley Land Trust, and the Center for a New American Dream, the latter two of which she helped found. She was a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress and a member of the Committee for Population, Resources, and the Environment of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society. She was a visiting scholar at the East-West Center in Honolulu, the Resource Policy Group in Oslo, Norway, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, and the Environmental Systems Analysis Group of the University of Kassel in Germany.

In 1991 Donella Meadows was selected as one of ten Pew Scholars in Conservation and the Environment. Her three-year award supported her international work in resource management with a systems point of view. Also in 1991 Donella Meadows collaborated with her previous co-authors Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers on a twenty-year update to Limits to Growth, called Beyond the Limits (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992), which has been translated, at last count, into fifteen languages.

The place to watch for global warming — the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine — is the Arctic. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by about three degrees. Which is just what is happening.