By Edward C. Wolf
Like clockwork, each Friday morning the first link I follow on Tidepool is the one to the latest “Global Citizen” column by Donella Meadows. There I’ve come to expect insight served up with grace, commentary that offers a gentle education about things that really count. I’m never disappointed.
Each month I have looked forward even more eagerly to a modest little newsletter that arrives in my mailbox, Xeroxed on plain paper, bearing the simple greeting “Dear folks.” The newsletter was Dana’s way of sharing her most recent columns and a more personal recounting of her work and life with a group of “subscribers” who, I’m sure, all thought of ourselves as Dana’s extended family. It was pure delight.
And absolutely characteristic of Dana to find such a way, in the midst of a press of commitments most of us can scarcely imagine, to build and nourish community.
I came to be one of the “folks” thirteen years ago, when Dana and I worked together for a short time on companion materials for a documentary series called “Race to Save the Planet.” Since then, a connection with Dana has been one of the reassuring continuities of my professional life.
Dana was a wonderful writer, whose clarity, conviction, and passion advanced sustainability over nearly thirty years. In every newspaper column, essay, and book, Dana showed her unusual gift for making the most complex issues — from endocrine disrupters to campaign finance reform — accessible and tractable.
Dana was a profound thinker, who wore her Ph.D. (in biophysics!) lightly, looked at the world and saw systems, and drew eclectically from a smorgasbord of disciplines from physics to Sufi wisdom. A teacher who thought to begin an environmental studies textbook with a chapter on mindsets, to help students see that we all bring to the world a lens of our own devising that colors the problems we perceive and the solutions we propose.
Dana lived her principles fully. Cultivating the land at Foundation Farm, the communal farm in the Connecticut River valley that was her home for 27 years. Cultivating a worldwide network of systems thinkers and doers who met each year at a lake in Hungary. Cultivating a vision of sustainability achieved through community, which became the Cobb Hill Cohousing project and the Sustainability Institute.
As attuned to the evidence of seasons outside her doorstep as to the latest scientific findings on climate change, Dana brought global to local together in a compelling and authentic way.
I grieve at knowing I won’t feel the warm embrace of those words, “Dear folks,” again. I’ll miss those monthly stories of farm life: lambs born, sheep escaped to neighbors’ pastures, the latest offerings of the seed catalogues. I’ll miss imagining Dana composing her letter in the farm kitchen to strains of Verdi and the aroma of baking loaves.
Most of all, I will miss the passionate, informed conviction expressed by each “Global Citizen” column – and the things she hadn’t had a chance to tell us yet. About the human genome project, for example. About global warming. About why an Office of Faith-Based Programs might serve neither faith nor community needs. I will wonder why every editorial page couldn’t make space for this intelligent and loving voice, this voice we so manifestly need, amid the ideological clatter that passes for debate on public policy today.
Dana Meadows’ extraordinary life’s work and her untimely death offer a few simple lessons:
Life is unexpectedly fragile.
Life is unbearably precious.
Life is an unknowable mystery that seeks always to teach, whether or not we are prepared to learn.
Wherever our convictions lead us and wherever our homes place us, Dana would say, we must not take the communities we build together for granted. With her spirit in our hearts, we can never do too much to build the just and healthy world that we can imagine – and that we deserve.
This article was originally written for the Tidepool News Service in Portland, Oregon.
