Articles by Donella Meadows
Donella H. Meadows (1941-2001) was an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and director of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vt.
All Articles
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If the Government Says It's Safe, It's Safe, Right?
The folks who bring us gene-spliced soybeans, corn, potatoes, and other foods like to make a point of the U.S. government’s approval of their products. The feds OK’d it. That must mean biotech foods are safe, right? Right. Sure. This is the government that declared DDT safe and thalidomide and DES and dozens of other […]
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There's What They Tell Us — And What They Don't Tell Us
What they tell us: The income tax is unfair. The top one percent of income earners pay one-third of all income tax. What they don’t tell us: The reason the top one percent pay so much of the income tax is that they have so much of the income. The richest 2.7 million Americans — […]
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The Latest News on the Ozone Layer
Twenty-five years ago, there appeared two scientific papers that rocked the industrial world. One of them, by Richard Stolarski and Ralph Cicerone, said that if chlorine atoms ever got wafted up into the stratosphere, they could eat up the ozone layer. The second, by Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland (who got the Nobel Prize for […]
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Seven-Plus Wonders of Sustainability
A couple of years ago, while I was doing something else, I heard snatches of a radio program in which Alan Durning, the director of Seattle’s Northwest Environment Watch, talked about the “Seven Sustainable Wonders of the World.” Clever concept, I thought, but afterward I could only remember three of his wonders: The bicycle — […]
