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

Donella Meadows

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" We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found. "

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

" 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

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

Donella Meadows

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

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

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

Donella Meadows

" We don't need new laws that can be used by organizations with deep pockets and the ability to deduct legal expenses as a cost of doing business to intimidate individuals or organizations that voice legitimate concerns. "

Donella Meadows

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" The climate continues to deteriorate. "

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

" 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

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

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

" Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent. "

Donella Meadows

" Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. "

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

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

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

" There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading. "

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

" 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

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

Donella Meadows