Loss of a Pioneering
Leader for a Sustainable Future
On February 20th with the death of Dr. Donella Meadows, the world lost an important and exemplary leader in the struggle for global and local sustain-ability. She was a leading environmental and systems scientist, outstanding teacher, path breaking writer and creative activist.Donella, known to her friends as Dana, was the lead author of the internationally renowned books, The Limits to Growth (1972) and the 20-year follow-up study, Beyond the Limits (1992). These internationally acclaimed books gave visibility to and established the terms of debate on the unprecedented and exponential patterns of growth in the human population, economy, and different types of resource depletion, waste and pollution.
She continued for 29 years to be a much sought after teacher at Dartmouth College even after she resigned her tenured appointment to launch a syndicated newspaper column, "The Global Citizen." She was recognized widely as evidenced by her being awarded a coveted McArthur Foundation "genius award" and a Pew Fellow Conservation award.
In her final column on Feb. 5, 200l, entitled "Polar Bear Naked," she began "The place to watch for global warming &endash; the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine&emdash;is the Arctic. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by about three degrees. Which is just what is happening. Polar bears are walking on thin ice." After proceeding to describe the multiple and rapidly occurring changes in the Arctic due to warming she addressed the question, "Can I give my friend [who is grief stricken and wondering what to tell her young child], you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart?" Her answer in part evidences her great vision and heart. Her final words to us and the columns readers were: "We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts and soul." (For the full text of this column and the archive of her other recent columns go to http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/).
Her activism was both global and local. In 1981 she co-founded and for 18 years coordinated the International Network of Resource Information Centers, more popularly called the Balaton Group. This network of hundreds of leading academics, researchers and activists in the sustainability movement has been unusually effective in stimulating rapid, creative and effective responses to the multiple emerging problems of unsustainability. In 1987 she founded in the U.S. the Sustainability Institute, which in her words is a "think-do-tank." For 27 years she worked directly on sustainable resource management by living and working on a small organic and communal farm in New Hampshire. Most recently she lived at Cobb Hill where at her death she was working with others to found an eco-village that incorporates an organic farm. To learn more about his pioneering effort that will continue see www.sustainabilityinstitute.org.
Memorial services for her are scheduled in San Francisco (April 21), Hanover, New Hampshire (April 22), Cambridge, MA (April 22) and Washington DC (April 22). Information on these observances and memorials for her can be found at <http://www.sustainer.org/meadows/memorials.html>. It was my privilege to know and to learn from Dana and, most of all, to be inspired by her example.
--Jim Crowfoot
Donella Meadows was the author or co-author of nine books, including:
The Limits to Growth (1972)
The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions (1983)
The Global Citizen (1991)
Beyond the Limits (1992)Web sites:
http://www.sustainer.org
The Sustainability Institute provides information, analysis, and practical demonstrations that can foster transitions to sustainable systems at all levels of society, from local to global.http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows
The bi-weekly column by Donella H. Meadows (1941-2001), director of the Sustainability Institute and an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.