Top 91 Donella Meadows Quotes
#1. Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.
Donella Meadows
#2. Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
Donella H. Meadows
#3. Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil.
Donella Meadows
#4. 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.
Donella Meadows
#6. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.
Donella H. Meadows
#7. 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.
Donella Meadows
#8. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.
Donella H. Meadows
#9. The Earth was formed whole and continuous in the Universe, without lines.
Donella H. Meadows
#10. Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. - A stitch in time saves nine.
Donella H. Meadows
#11. Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.
Donella Meadows
#12. 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.
Donella Meadows
#13. Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
Donella Meadows
#14. 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.
Donella Meadows
#16. 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.
Donella Meadows
#17. 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 right
Donella Meadows
#18. 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.
Donella Meadows
#19. 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.
Donella Meadows
#20. Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough.
Donella Meadows
#21. 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.
Donella Meadows
#22. We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
Donella H. Meadows
#24. Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.
Donella H. Meadows
#25. What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.
Donella Meadows
#26. Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So
Donella H. Meadows
#27. George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.
Donella Meadows
#28. Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.
Donella H. Meadows
#29. A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. - Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Donella H. Meadows
#30. Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.
Donella H. Meadows
#31. 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.
Donella Meadows
#32. 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.
Donella Meadows
#33. 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?
Donella Meadows
#34. 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.
Donella Meadows
#35. There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president.
Donella Meadows
#36. 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.
Donella Meadows
#37. Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.
Donella H. Meadows
#38. 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.
Donella Meadows
#39. Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information
Donella Meadows
#40. We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
Donella Meadows
#41. Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent.
Donella Meadows
#42. 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.
Donella Meadows
#43. 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.
Donella Meadows
#44. 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?
Donella Meadows
#45. 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.
Donella Meadows
#46. 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.
Donella Meadows
#47. 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.
Donella Meadows
#48. It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.
Donella H. Meadows
#49. 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.
Donella Meadows
#50. A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path
[in Mediated Modeling page 43]
Donella H. Meadows
#52. 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.
Donella Meadows
#54. Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes ... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. - RUSSELL ACKOFF,
Donella H. Meadows
#55. 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.
Donella Meadows
#56. 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.
Donella Meadows
#57. 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?
Donella Meadows
#58. If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.
Donella H. Meadows
#59. 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.
Donella Meadows
#60. You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.
Donella Meadows
#61. The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
Donella H. Meadows
#62. 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.
Donella Meadows
#63. We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.
Donella H. Meadows
#64. The grand jury's job is not to weigh the evidence from both sides; it is only to decide whether there is enough evidence on one side to bring a person to trial.
Donella Meadows
#65. A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate.
Donella Meadows
#66. The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends - usually - on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand.
Donella H. Meadows
#67. [Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about.
Donella H. Meadows
#68. My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.
Donella H. Meadows
#69. Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. - Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen,
Donella H. Meadows
#70. Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent.
Donella Meadows
#71. 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.
Donella Meadows
#72. A good leader sets the right goals, gets things moving, and helps us to discover that we already know what to do.
Donella Meadows
#73. A system consists of elements, interconnections, and a purpose. Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system.
Donella H. Meadows
#74. 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.
Donella Meadows
#75. Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone's human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left.
Donella Meadows
#76. These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.
Donella H. Meadows
#77. 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.
Donella Meadows
#78. Stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.
Donella H. Meadows
#79. 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.
Donella Meadows
#80. 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.
Donella Meadows
#81. I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure - a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest.
Donella Meadows
#82. 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.
Donella Meadows
#83. Growth is a stupid goal. So, by the way, is no-growth.
Donella Meadows
#84. 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.
Donella Meadows
#85. A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor.
Donella Meadows
#86. 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.
Donella Meadows
#87. The European nations take climate change very seriously.
Donella Meadows
#88. 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.
Donella Meadows
#89. 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.
Donella Meadows
#90. The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made.
Donella Meadows
#91. 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.
Donella Meadows
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