Donella Meadows Quotes
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Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government 'help' is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide.
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It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.
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Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written.
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How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing?
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The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made.
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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.
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The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.
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Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent.
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George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.
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Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park.
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I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes.
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We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection.
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The climate continues to deteriorate.
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I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure - a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest.
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Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent.
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You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.
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Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.
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We don't need bigger cars or fancier clothes. We need self-respect, identity, community, love, variety, beauty, challenge and a purpose in living that is greater than material accumulation.
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Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known.
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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!
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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.