Words matter. These are the best Donella Meadows Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Once again I stopped listening to the news this week.
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.
In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked.
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.
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.
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.
No one wants growth, constant expansion, physical swelling. Growth is not a human value; it’s a means to the ends of sufficiency and security. Once we have enough, no one wants more, unless it is sold to us as a cheap substitute for something else, something non-material.
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.
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.
What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign.
The climate continues to deteriorate.
You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.
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.
Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil.
Some call-in moderators are neutral and courteous. Then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who is funny and pompous and a scapegoater and hatemonger. His popularity could cause you to draw some terrible conclusions about the state of mind of the American people. It helps to remember that Bill Cosby is popular, too.
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.
If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us.
I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure – a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.
Smart development builds on a region’s own skills, resources and local businesses. Dumb growth invites a big corporation in, surrenders control and profits to a distant headquarters, undercuts local manufacturers, and risks layoffs without warning.
World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.
Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent.
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.
Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos.
Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.
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.
A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world’s nations toward saving the climate.
George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.
There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president.
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.
Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
