Donella Meadows
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.
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.
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.
The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.Collection: Simple
The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be rightCollection: Nature
We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!Collection: Figures
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.Collection: Purpose
The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.Collection: People
There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.Collection: Despair
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.Collection: Cells
Since the Earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature's diversity is gone?Collection: Diversity
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.Collection: Justice
A good leader sets the right goals, gets things moving, and helps us to discover that we already know what to do.Collection: Moving
We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.Collection: Mistake
Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.Collection: Self
A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]Collection: Vision
Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester informationCollection: Delay
It is not OK in this culture to talk to friends about causes you believe in, much less to ask them to join in. It's OK to blast perfect strangers with crass messages every hour of the day, but it's a tinge embarrassing, it brings up some shyness, it seems an intrusion, it risks rejection to share real heartfelt commitments. It's easier to share our cynicism with strangers than our dreams with friends.Collection: Friends
It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.Collection: Impact
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.Collection: Government
Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.Collection: Models
I call the transformed world toward which we can move ‘sustainable,’ by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.Collection: Spiritual
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 NinosCollection: Party
Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified.Collection: Views
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 leakedCollection: Permit
George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilmanCollection: Texas
Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable?Collection: Stupid
How do we appreciate the good without letting it be the enemy of the perfect? How do we keep a step in the right direction from becoming a stopping point? How do we get beyond shades of insipid light green?Collection: Light
Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National ParkCollection: National Parks
A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutorCollection: Sides