On This Day We Examine the Failed Environmental Movement
By Donella Meadows –April 20, 1995– The journalistic attention cycle has arrived at the point where we talk about the environment only on one obligatory day per year — Earth Day — and then we declare...
View ArticleWhat Should Be Privatized and What Should Not?
By Donella Meadows –January 4, 1996– The other day I saw a cartoon in which a puzzled housewife, ready to plug in her vacuum cleaner, is confronted with a dozen plugs on the wall. Each has a company...
View ArticleHow Environmentalists Ought to Talk
By Donella Meadows –February 29, 1996– Environmentalists are too gloomy. They invent catastrophes to attract attention and money. Bugs and trees are what they care about, not people. They want to...
View ArticleHow a Public Health Story Becomes an Industry Legend
By Donella Meadows –February 7, 1997– If the name Alar means anything to you, it probably means something related to apples and Meryl Streep and hysterical environmentalists. Those mental associations...
View ArticleOur Michael Dorris
By Donella Meadows –April 24, 1997– On the Sunday after Michael Dorris committed suicide, the news was announced, gently and sadly, in a church here in the valley where he lived. A bit of the story...
View ArticleWhy Kosovo is a Battleground Again
by Donella Meadows — April 1, 1999 — Surprised citizens are flooding Congress with calls asking how this Kosovo mess came about and why we’re involved in it. When I heard that, my first thought was,...
View ArticleThe Dow Passes Ten Thousand – Hooray?
by Donella Meadows — April 15, 1999 — Wow! The Dow-Jones average is over ten thousand! And still, as of this writing, rising. Judging from the media celebration, here is proof positive that America...
View ArticleThe New Century as Seen From More Serious Places
By Donella Meadows –January 6, 2000– I was bewailing the short-term, sound-bite, soul-less way in which the U.S. media greeted the turn not only of a century, but of a millennium. (You know — lists of...
View ArticleForget Camp David, Forget Survivor, Watch Capitol Hill
by Donella Meadows — July 20, 2000 — I don’t get it. Why are the 24-hour news media, always desperate for gripping stories, reporting every hour on the Camp David summit, where, as I write this...
View ArticleReaders Roar Back with Varying Degrees of Politeness
By Donella Meadows –January 4, 2001– Sending an opinion column into the world is a bit like tickling a sleeping bear. Sometimes you get back low rumbles. Every now and then you stir up a roar. Who...
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