Donella Meadows Quotes

Donella H. "Dana" Meadows was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential books The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems: a Primer. Wikipedia

✵ 13. March 1941 – 20. February 2001

Donella Meadows: 15 quotes 0 likes

Famous Donella Meadows Quotes

“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.”

Donella Meadows

Meadows (1982) " Whole Earth Models and Systems http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/040324/48c97c243f534eee32d379e69b039289/WER-INFO-73.pdf". In: The CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer, pages 98–108.

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

Donella Meadows

Meadows (2000) " No Point in Waiting Around for Leadership http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0221-04.htm". in: The Global Citizen, November 30, 2000.

“There always will be limits to growth.”

Donella Meadows

Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

“The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.”

Donella Meadows

Pages 188-191.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

“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.”

Donella Meadows

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

“Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?”

Donella Meadows

Page 169.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Donella Meadows Quotes

“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?”

Donella Meadows

Page 169.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

World , Way

“When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.”

Donella Meadows

Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

“Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.”

Donella Meadows

Meadows (1980) "The unavoidable a priori" in: Randers J. ed., Elements of the system dynamics method, page 27.

“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!”

Donella Meadows

Page 2.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

People , Way , Behavior , Time

“A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.”

Donella Meadows

Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Time

“In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving growth and at least one balancing feedback loop constraining growth, because no system can grow forever in a finite environment.”

Donella Meadows

Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008), Appendix (summary)

“Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.”

Donella Meadows

Page 107.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008), Part two: systems and us

Perfection , Optimism

“Like resilience, self-organizazion is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.”

Donella Meadows

Page 79.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008), Part two: systems and us

Self-confidence

“In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.”

Donella Meadows

Page 15.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008), Part one: systems structure and behavior

Behavior

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