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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.

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  • Americans dragged their heels at The Hague, but others are acting to stop climate change

    The most earth-shaking event of the past two weeks had to do with leadership, or lack thereof, but it did not unfold in Florida. It happened in the Netherlands. The stunning lack of leadership came from the Clinton-Gore administration. The meeting in The Hague was the sixth attempt since the Kyoto conference of 1997 to […]

  • Reading tea leaves for the environment

    Every month I get a kind of Reader’s Digest for people interested in the future. It’s called Future Survey, issued by the World Future Society. Each month it contains about 50 extended summaries of recent publications about the paths — economic, environmental, social — we seem to be following. The November 2000 issue, for example, […]

  • The endless campaign shows it's time to change the electoral system

    What is it we are learning in the aftermath of this crazy election? How powerful a single vote can be? Or how worthless a single vote can be, when 19,000 of them can be tossed out in one county? When boxes of ballots get lost? When recounts are demanded or stopped depending on their expected […]

  • The key is learning to learn

    During the weekend before Election Day, as midgets battled furiously on warped playing fields, two giants fell, both yielding their lives peacefully, knowingly, with dignity, to cancer. The better-known one was David Brower, the great outdoorsman and thunderer for the environment. Even in his 70s and 80s he was still shaking up the Sierra Club, […]