Donella H. Meadows Quotes

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.

One of the strangest assumptions of present-day mental models is the idea that world of moderation must be a world of strict, centralized government control. For a sustainable economy, that kind of control is not possible, desirable, or necessary.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

But rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way.

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.

The difference between a sustainable society and a present-day economic recession is like the difference between stopping and automobile purposefully with the brakes versus stopping it by crashing into a brick wall. When the present economy overshoots, it turns around too quickly and unexpectedly for people and enterprises to retrain, relocate, and readjust. A deliberate transition to sustainability would take place slowly enough, and with enough forewarning, to that people and businesses could find their places in the new economy.

[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.

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

The Earth was formed whole and continuous in the Universe, without lines.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can't make it perfect.

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

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

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

You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.