Donella Meadows Quotes

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.

Climate change, demographics, water, food, energy, global health, women's empowerment - these issues are all intertwined. We cannot look at one strand in isolation. Instead, we must examine how these strands are woven together.

What motivates me is the conviction that our problems are mainly a consequence of a lack of holistic understanding of the man-made system in which we are entwined.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

We need to treat the planet as a system, and up until now, we've operated more as if the world were made of separate parts - this part is environment, this part is economy. But everything is connected. You can't fix global warming with a Ph.D. in thermodynamics!

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

Treat the world like a head.

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.

Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.

Business cannot succeed in a world that is failing.

The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed.

As with much of the world's problems, they become public--or much more of interest--the moment they begin to impact the West.

There are serious problems that have to do with the environment, that have to do with the way in which we live and consume.

We need an economics fit for purpose in a finite and entropic world.

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists -we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. We understand there are bigger problems we need to solve as a species than what God you pray to.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

If we had one person who could perfectly read minds we could solve a lot of problems in the world in a very short period of time.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change.

In what I think is the most serious problem the world faces, which is the population explosion, we will come I think to a time when measures that are not even dreamt of now will become necessary.

Tending to ourselves, we tend the world. Tending the world, we tend ourselves.

I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."

Ayurveda is the science of life and it has a very basic, simple kind of approach, which is that we are part of the universe and the universe is intelligent and the human body is part of the cosmic body, and the human mind is part of the cosmic mind, and the atom and the universe are exactly the same thing, but with different form, and the more we are in touch with this deeper reality, from where everything comes, the more we will be able to heal ourselves and at the same time heal our planet.