I wonder if of the permies on this list who have been around for some
time, and of the USers amongst us, someone can englighten me on
something of our PC history.
I´ve just come across archives of Donella (Dana) Meadows
(see below for biog.)
and I wonder just how much she's (directly or indirectly) one of the
founding mothers of permaculture - does anyone here know of her?
I seem to remember that Mollison mentions Limits to Growth quite a bit
as one of the reasons for PC coming about ... and Dana must have been a
very early pioneer of system thinking.
She seems to me to be a very early pioneer in modelling & applying
system thinking to our society-nature interface, with action (if she
wrote Limits to Growth in 1972, she must have been working on this
quite some time before that)
She was founder & director of the Sustainability Institute (founded
1996) which to date seems to do a lot of work on systems thinking.
And she died very young, at 60*.
it would be great if someone here knew her - please let me know what
personal connection (if any) she or the Institute has with
permaculture?
thanks
Stella
- in Spain
--------------
Donella (Dana) Meadows
(1941-2001)
Systems Analyst, Journalist, Writer, Teacher, Farmer
Leading voice in the sustainability movement
Mac Arthur Fellow
Pew Scholar
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Honoree
Dr. Donella H. Meadows (Ph.D. in biophysics, Harvard University), the
founder of the Sustainability Institute, was a professor at Dartmouth
College, a long-time organic farmer, a journalist, and a systems
analyst. She was honored both as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and
Environment and as a Mac Arthur Fellow.
For 16 years Donella wrote a weekly column called "The Global Citizen,"
commenting on world events from a systems point of view. It appeared in
more than twenty newspapers, won second place in the 1985 Champion-Tuck
national competition for outstanding journalism in the fields of
business and economics, received the Walter C. Paine Science Education
Award in 1990, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991.
Donella was the author or co-author of nine books, including:
The Limits to Growth (1972)
The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions (1983)
The Global Citizen (1991)
Beyond the Limits (1992)
The Limits to Growth - the 30 Year Update (2004)
This is a public collection of the work of Donella (Dana) Meadows.
Through her writing and speaking, Dana helped people understand global
systems with long delays and complex feedbacks, while also inspiring
many to think about individual choices in daily living.
Here you will find 15 years worth of essays published as the award
winning weekly Global Citizen column.
..................................
* (her early death I find as suprising as Emilia Hazlip dying at 65,
given that they were both organic farmers, supposedly eating from their
gardens, with physical, outdoor lives, etc.)