Donella "Dana" Meadows (March 13, 1941 – February 20, 2001) was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential book Limits to Growth.
Born: March 13th, 1941
Died: February 20th, 2001
Categories: Environmentalists, Educators, Science authors, Systems scientists, 2000s deaths, Americans
Quotes: 8 sourced quotes total (includes 2 about)
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Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
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.
Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.
When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time — starting now.
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.
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.
How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing? How do systems create cultures? How do cultures create
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away. Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.