Donella Meadows Quotes
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Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.
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No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There's only one way to get a government - and a nation - to stop drifting to low performance. That's to wake up and insist on higher standards.
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Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.
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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.
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A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate.
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Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
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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.
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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.
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Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.
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Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
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There always will be limits to growth.
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The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings.