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DONELLA MEADOWS
"Simple
miracles. Satisfying work, like baking bread or building a
shelf. Fresh, delicious food. . . . Health for land and people.
Sometimes I wonder, with all our supposed progress, what we're
rushing toward and what we're leaving behind."
—Donella Meadows, "An Ode to the Cow and the Milk,"
The Global Citizen, January 25, 2001
Hartland
- Donella Meadows, 59, of Hartland Four Corners, Vermont,
died Tuesday at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover,
New Hampshire, after a brief illness. She was an Adjunct Professor
at Dartmouth College and Director of the Sustainability Institute
with headquarters in Hartland.
Donella
Meadows was born March 13, 1941 in Elgin, Illinois, and trained
as a scientist, earning a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton
College in 1963 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University
in 1968.
Donella
Meadows taught at Dartmouth College from 1972 until her death.
She was on the faculty of the interdisciplinary Environmental
Studies Program and the graduate program of the Resource Policy
Center. In 1983 she resigned her tenured professorship to
devote more time to international activities and writing.
She retained an Adjunct Professorship at Dartmouth, teaching
environmental journalism and, more recently, environmental
ethics.
In 1972
Meadows was on the team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
that produced the global computer model "World3"
for the Club of Rome. She was the principal author of the
book The Limits to Growth, which described that model,
and sold millions of copies in 28 languages. In 1991 she collaborated
with her co-authors, Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, on
a twenty-year update to The Limits to Growth, called
Beyond the Limits. She was also co-author of two technical
books, published in 1973 and 1974 by the MIT Press, Toward
Global Equilibrium and The Dynamics of Growth in a
Finite World .
Since
then she has been involved in numerous studies of social,
environmental, energy, and agriculture systems. She chronicled
the emerging field of global modeling in her 1981 book Groping
in the Dark: the First Decade of Global Modeling. In 1983
she criticized the state of the art of social system modeling
using nine case studies in The Electronic Oracle: Computer
Models and Social Decisions.
Since
1985, Donella Meadows has written a weekly newspaper column,
"The Global Citizen," self-syndicated in more than
20 papers nationwide. The column was awarded second place
in the 1985 Champion-Tuck national competition for outstanding
journalism in the fields of business and economics. "The
Global Citizen" also received the Walter C. Paine Science
Education Award in 1990 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
in 1991. Selected columns were published in 1991 as a book,
also called The Global Citizen .
With Dennis
Meadows she founded and coordinated INRIC, the International
Network of Resource Information Centers, also called the Balaton
Group. INRIC is a coalition of systems-oriented analysts and
activists in 50 nations, all of whom work to promote sustainable,
high-productivity resource management. Through INRIC, Meadows
developed training games and workshops on resource management,
which she presented in Hungary, Kenya, Costa Rica, Portugal,
Singapore, Germany, and the United States. She helped to organize
an annual conference in Hungary at which Balaton Group members
exchange information and plan joint projects.
During
1988-90 Meadows worked with television producers at WGBH-TV
in Boston to develop the ten-part PBS series "Race to
Save the Planet." She was writing a college textbook,
tentatively titled A Sustainable World: an Introduction
to Environmental Systems, to accompany the programs as
part of an Annenberg/CPB telecourse.
Donella
Meadows served on the Board of Directors of the Hunger Project,
the Winrock International Livestock Research Center, and the
Trust for New Hampshire Lands. She was a co-founder and served
on the Boards of the Upper Valley Land Trust and the Center
for a New American Dream, and had been a consultant to the
Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. She
was a member of the Committee for Population, Resources, and
the Environment of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, and a member of the Committee for Research and
Exploration of the National Geographic Society.
Meadows
had been a visiting scholar at the East-West Center in Honolulu,
the Resource Policy Group in Oslo, Norway, the International
Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, and
the Environmental Systems Analysis Group of the University
of Kassel in Germany.
In 1991
Donella Meadows was selected as one of ten Pew Scholars in
Conservation and the Environment. Her three-year award supported
her international work in resource management with a systems
point of view. In 1994 she was awarded a five-year MacArthur
Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Meadows
lived for 27 years on a small, communal, organic farm in Plainfield,
New Hampshire, where she worked at sustainable resource management
directly. In 1999 she moved to Cobb Hill in Hartland Four
Corners, Vermont. There she worked with others to found an
eco-village, maintain an organic farm, and establish headquarters
for the Sustainability Institute. Development of both the
co-housing village and the Institute will continue.
Donella
Meadows' mother, Phoebe Quist, has referred to her daughter
as an "earth missionary." Meadows described herself
in light-hearted Website profiles as "an opinionated
columnist, perpetual fund-raiser, fanatic gardener, opera-lover,
baker, farmer, teacher and global gadfly."
Donella
Meadows is survived by her mother of Tahlequah, Oklahoma,
her father, Don Hager of Palatine, Illinois, a brother, Jason
Hager, of Waterford, Wisconsin, and cousins and nephews.
A memorial
service will be announced at a later date. Memorial donations
may be made to The Sustainability Institute or to Cobb Hill
Cohousing, both at P.O. Box 174, Hartland Four Corners, VT
05049.
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