Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows
Donella H. "Dana" Meadowswas a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems: a Primer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
Date of Birth14 March 1941
CountryUnited States of America
consumers people produces products quickly seduced until
Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.
against bending call leaning people shy talk town trouble wall
At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation.
earth exception hardly life people possible spill
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
cells people patterns
A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.
people vision credit
The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.
sunshine years people
The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more. The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops.
government people support
The actions of my government are not bearable. They devastate our natural resources and deprive our people. The politicians speak piously while practicing greed and divisiveness; they care nothing for the nation. I want to do more than withdraw my support. I want to tar and feather them.
australia central eight five mexico people south village
If the world were a village of 100 people, ... there would be 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, eight people from Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, five from the U.S.A. and Canada, and one from Australia or New Zealand.
behave powerful
If they can do these things to the most powerful person in the nation, they can do them to you or me. Dictatorships behave this way, not democracies.
businesses critically dead feeding food genetic putting stop substances tinkering
We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons.
impossible leveling life moving thoughts wasting
We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.
ask campaigns corrupt expect given highest jokes mean sale seem vice
We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars.
ability business cost expenses intimidate laws legal legitimate pockets voice
We don't need new laws that can be used by organizations with deep pockets and the ability to deduct legal expenses as a cost of doing business to intimidate individuals or organizations that voice legitimate concerns.
dependent integrated life planet shaped sustains system third
We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life.