97 Quotes by Donella Meadows

The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made.

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.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.