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Don Imus in My Back Yard
By Donella Meadows
–July 18, 1996–
The painters arrived, set their radio on the lawn, switched it on, and went up their ladders to scrape the second floor.
The program they were beaming through the beautiful summer day was Don Imus. I didn’t know that at first, because I’d never heard Don Imus. I’d heard OF him, but I thought you could only [...]
Citizens Who Love Their Ponds Can Help to Save Them
By Donella Meadows
–July 11, 1996–
The good news is that our Clean Water Act, plus billions of dollars in municipal treatment plants and industrial wastewater processing, has rescued many of our streams and lakes from sewerhood.
The bad news is that, with the nastiest waste pipes cleaned up, we still insult our waterbodies with filled-in wetlands, runoff from lawns and farms, here [...]
You Can’t Live on the Pond and Have the Pond
By Donella Meadows
–July 6, 1996–
Les Kaufman called me from the Boston University Marine Program, sputtering about Title Five. “How do you get people to care about little brown fish?” he grumbled. “I always thought clean ponds were a New England thing. Now we’re turning the place into Texas, where you can’t see three inches into the water, and no one [...]
What Shall We Do With Our Differences?
By Donella Meadows
–June 20, 1996–
A newspaper article the other day explained why the European Community is sure to fall apart. The Europeans, it said, are just too different from each other ever to get along.
To prove the point, the author repeated that hoary joke about heaven and hell. In heaven the police are British, the mechanics are German, the cooks [...]
Gardening Brings Out the Truth
By Donella Meadows
–June 13, 1996–
Something about gardening gets me thinking about politics. Maybe it’s the bending over with the blood running to my head. Maybe making a tiny piece of the world beautiful gets me wishing the whole world could be beautiful. Maybe it’s sunstroke.
Anyway, as I was in front of the house the other day putting in marigolds, I [...]
