Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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
Donella Meadows

There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president.

Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows

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.