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" Once again I stopped listening to the news this week. "

Donella Meadows

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" We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons. "

Donella Meadows

" Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it. "

Donella Meadows

" Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one. "

Donella Meadows

" Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Donella Meadows

" I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure - a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest. "

Donella Meadows

" Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil. "

Donella Meadows

" 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. "

Donella Meadows

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

Donella Meadows

" We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection. "

Donella Meadows

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

Donella Meadows

" 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. "

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

" In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked. "

Donella Meadows

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

Donella Meadows

" 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. "

Donella Meadows

" Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. "

Donella Meadows

" Growth is a stupid goal. So, by the way, is no-growth. "

Donella Meadows

" Some call-in moderators are neutral and courteous. Then there's Rush Limbaugh, who is funny and pompous and a scapegoater and hatemonger. His popularity could cause you to draw some terrible conclusions about the state of mind of the American people. It helps to remember that Bill Cosby is popular, too. "

Donella Meadows

" 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. "

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

" At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation. "

Donella Meadows

" No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There's only one way to get a government - and a nation - to stop drifting to low performance. That's to wake up and insist on higher standards. "

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

" George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman. "

Donella Meadows

" The climate continues to deteriorate. "

Donella Meadows

" A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor. "

Donella Meadows

" I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes. "

Donella Meadows