Donella Meadows Project
Donella (Dana) Meadows’ voice, perspectives, and hopeful vision continue to offer inspiration and practical guidance on how to navigate complexity, transform rigid and oppressive systems, and create beauty within communities and organizations.
“I am an opinionated columnist, perpetual fundraiser, fanatic gardener, opera-lover, baker, farmer, teacher, and global gadfly.”
– Donella Meadows
“We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”
– Donella Meadows
Who is Donella Meadows?
A Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment and a MacArthur Fellow, Dana Meadows was one of the most influential environmental thinkers of the twentieth century. After receiving a Ph.D in Biophysics from Harvard, she joined a team at MIT applying the relatively new tools of system dynamics to global problems. She was the principal author of The Limits to Growth (1972), which sold more than 9 million copies in 26 languages and began a debate about the Earth's capacity to support human economic expansion within finite resources. She went on to author or co-author eight additional books while teaching in the Environmental Studies program at Dartmouth College before her untimely passing in 2001.
In 1982, she co-founded the Balaton Group, to look at the global process of information sharing and collaboration involving hundreds of leading academics, researchers, and scientists. Today the Group “generates new research, new action and new solutions for sustainability.”
For 16 years Dana wrote a weekly syndicated column called “The Global Citizen,” commenting on world events from a systems point of view. It appeared in more than twenty newspapers and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991.
Meanwhile, Dana also kept in touch with a growing number of colleagues and friends through the Dear Folks letters, a monthly newsletter filled with life and reflections from living on the land and as a global scientist.
In 1996, Dana founded the Sustainability Institute (now called Academy for Systems Change) with the mission of fostering transitions to sustainable systems at all levels of society, from local to global. To this end, the Institute blended research on global systems with a practical demonstration of sustainable living through the development of the Cobb Hill co-housing community and farm.
If you’re interested in learning more about our history, please see our History section.
Donella Meadows Project
As we continue to curate the seminal work of Dana Meadows through the online archive, we are also keeping close attention to the many ways that educators, decision-makers, community- and organizational leaders engage with her work. Below we list the top resources that our readers find most helpful.
Envisioning a Sustainable World — a powerful video of Dana’s speech on the crucial role that visioning plays in bringing about the world we want
Tools for the Transition to Sustainability — in this chapter, Dana discusses the importance of visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving in the quest for sustainability
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System — probably Dana’s most famous article, this piece illuminates Dana’s deep wisdom about how systems work and how we can engage with them strategically to create the most change
Dancing with Systems — another powerful piece about how people can work with systems once they lose the illusion of control over them
The Limits to Growth — the groundbreaking 1972 study that launched Donella Meadows onto the global stage as a leading climate thinker and writer
Explore the Donella Meadows Archive
For more resources, including videos, photos, monthly letters, columns, and essays we invite you to explore the online archive. This is where Dana’s vibrant day-to-day and fine web of relations come to life!
