Donella Meadows: Quotes about behavior

Donella Meadows was American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer. Explore interesting quotes on behavior.
Donella Meadows: 30 quotes0 likes

“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)

“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)

“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