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Russia and China, Seen Through Fun-House Mirrors
By Donella Meadows
–May 15, 1997–
We have a hard time seeing straight when we look at countries as large and potentially powerful as our own — countries such as Russia and China. We see mainly our own fears or expectations, and so we deceive ourselves, at enormous cost.
During the long, terrible decades of Russia’s communist rule, we systematically exaggerated its strength [...]
The Ads Tell the Story of the Universe
By Donella Meadows
–May 1, 1997–
You don’t expect an unsettling indictment of modern advertising to crop up in a book about the birth of the universe. But there it is, right in the middle of the second chapter of physicist Brian Swimme’s new book “The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos.”
Swimme describes how children have historically learned their place in the world. [...]
Environmental Debates Have Science and Emotion on All Sides
By Donella Meadows
–May 1, 1997–
OK, that’s it.
I’ve heard that “science versus emotion” taunt just once too often.
Nuclear power proponents toss it out like a grenade to silence people who are “irrationally” worried about radioactivity. This is an industry whose wastes will be deadly for thousands of years after the last “scientific” spokesman accuses the last worried citizen of unjustified “emotion.”
Food [...]
Our Michael Dorris
By Donella Meadows
–April 24, 1997–
On the Sunday after Michael Dorris committed suicide, the news was announced, gently and sadly, in a church here in the valley where he lived.
A bit of the story came out that Sunday morning. Our neighbor, teacher, favorite writer was separated from the woman we knew as the love of his life, the even more celebrated [...]
A Week to Kick the TV Habit
By Donella Meadows
–April 17, 1997–
I can just see, ten or twenty years from now, a series of lawsuits that finally force executives of a few immensely profitable companies to admit that their product is addictive. They have always known that their business damages people and society. They manipulate its content to make it even more habit-forming and destructive. And they [...]
