Donella H. Meadows Quotes & Sayings

The Earth was formed whole and continuous in the Universe, without lines. — Donella H. Meadows

The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends - usually - on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand. — Donella H. Meadows

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment. — Donella H. Meadows

Carter also was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped. — Donella H. Meadows

A system consists of elements, interconnections, and a purpose. Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system. — Donella H. Meadows

If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system's function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. — Donella H. Meadows

It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. — Donella H. Meadows

Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space. — Donella H. Meadows

[Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. — Donella H. Meadows

Self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. — Donella H. Meadows

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made. — Donella H. Meadows

There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair. — Donella H. Meadows

You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere. — Donella H. Meadows

When we, system dynamicists, see a pattern persist in many parts of a system over long periods, we assume that it has causes embedded in the feedback loop structure of the system. Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. Growth as usual has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Continuing growth as usual will never close that gap. Only changing the structure of the system - the chains of causes and effects - will do that. — Donella H. Meadows

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. — Donella H. Meadows

A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path
[in Mediated Modeling page 43] — Donella H. Meadows

The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system's performance. — Donella H. Meadows

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes ... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. - RUSSELL ACKOFF, — Donella H. Meadows

My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability. — Donella H. Meadows

Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today. — Donella H. Meadows

Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So — Donella H. Meadows

The limits on a growing system may be temporary or permanent. The system may find ways to get around them for a short while or a long while, but eventually there must come some kind of accommodation, the system adjusting to the constraint, or the constraint to the system, or both to each other. In that accommodation come some interesting dynamics.
Whether the constraining balancing loops originate from a renewable or nonrenewable resource makes some difference, not in whether growth can continue forever, but in how growth is likely to end. — Donella H. Meadows

You can't navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. — Donella H. Meadows

Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. - Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen, — Donella H. Meadows

Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows. — Donella H. Meadows

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization — Donella H. Meadows

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe. — Donella H. Meadows

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock. — Donella H. Meadows

A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. - Don't put all your eggs in one basket. — Donella H. Meadows

We can't impose our will on 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 H. Meadows

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. - ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Donella H. Meadows

Stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior. — Donella H. Meadows

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. — Donella H. Meadows

When our small research group moved from MIT to Dartmouth College years ago, one of the Dartmouth engineering professors watched us in seminars for a while, and then dropped by our offices. "You people are different," he said. "You ask different kinds of questions. You see things I don't see. Somehow you come at the world in a different way. How? Why? — Donella H. Meadows

These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field. — Donella H. Meadows

If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon. — Donella H. Meadows

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully. — Donella H. Meadows

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. — Donella H. Meadows

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency. The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor. — Donella H. Meadows

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. - A stitch in time saves nine. — Donella H. Meadows

We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people. — Donella H. Meadows

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called "drift to low performance" is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we're only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are "not news." They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can't expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love. — Donella H. Meadows