A Death Anniversary Remembrance for Dana Meadows in 2015

February 20^th , today, is Dana Meadows death anniversary.  She died on February 20^th, 2001.  She was 59 years old.  For several years, and again today, I have chosen to write a brief death anniversary remembrance and acknowledgement.  This is not because I claim, or would want anyone to believe that I claim, some special status among the many persons who respected, loved, admired and, on occasion, collaborated with Dana.  I do not.

In choosing a death anniversary quotation from Dana’s work, I have often turned to her writings about love.  Dana understood what it meant to love, more deeply and unselfishly than anyone I have known.  It was reflected in her Global Citizen columns and even in her more “scholarly” writings.  However her writings on computer modeling, environmental science, sustainability, ethics, epistemology and public policy were equally clear and profound. 

In this remembrance I quote from her writing on epistemology.  The source is Chapter 1 of a remarkable, yet unpublished, 927pp.  manuscript entitled,  A Sustainable World: An Introduction to Environmental Systems.  It was made available to me through the kindness of Marta Ceroni, who directs the Donella Meadows Institute (formerly the Sustainability Institute).  The Chapter is entitled “Thinking about Thinking:  What Have We Learned About What  We Know.”   Dana writes

“We hope you will see that learning about the planet is not just a process of pouring into yourself a lot of facts that someone else already knows (though there will be some of that to do).  It's a process of making models, testing them, making more models, testing them again, examining yourself and your own biases as well as those of other people, and sometimes, suddenly, seeing the world in startling new ways. …The problems of our world – and their solutions are a direct function of what we think, what we know, and the certainty with which we know it.  …

“…Unfortunately we know less about how to work our planet than we do about our cars.  We are not familiar with its levers and buttons.  We barely comprehend what is attached to what.  We don't always recognize when it is malfunctioning, and the people we turn it over to -- politicians, generals, corporate executives, other kinds of leaders -- are not selected for their knowledge of planetary mechanics.  There could be a breakdown.  Some say it's already here.  If a breakdown occurs, there isn't another planet handy to take over the vital services we get from this one.

“…What [this] book can do is be a foundation, and more importantly a guide to the process of learning about, thinking about, coping with, and acting effectively upon planetary problems. 

“… Every time you read the paper or watch the evening news, get involved in your community's planning process, go on a Saturday bird-watching expedition, plant a garden, or travel to a new place, you have an opportunity to learn more about the planetary systems that support you -- and to become more effective in acting to keep those systems healthy and sustainable.”

As far as I know, Dana was never a “religious” person, however she was a deeply spiritual one.  For a time, I know that she studied Buddhist philosophy and set time aside for meditation, mostly following Zen Buddhist practices.  Thus it seems appropriate to end this reflection, on Dana’s behalf, with a prayer that is sometimes included in Buddhist death anniversary remembrances:

“May all be free from sorrow and the causes of sorrow.

May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless.”

'LOVE" - A RESOURCE WITHOUT LIMITS

For reasons that would not be of great interest, I have reflecting on the concept of “love” lately and am going to share a few postings on the matter.  Here is a wonderful passage from my friend and sometime collaborator, the late Donella (Dana) Meadows.  In many conversations when we were together, the topic of love  often came up. 

Dana wrote the following in 1992.  With some minor editing it concluded her co-authored sequel to The Limits to Growth, Beyond the Limits.

OPERATE FROM LOVE

One is not allowed to say that in public any more.  Anyone who calls upon the human capacity for brotherly and sisterly love, generosity, compassion, will be met with a hail of cynicism.  Once when I tried to do so, a high government official stood up to say, "Of all scarce resources, love is the scarcest."

I just don't believe that.  Love is not a scarce resource, it is an untapped one.  Our jazzed-up, hustling, quantitative culture does not know how to tap it, how to discuss it, or even what it means.

 I am a child of that culture, and worse, a scientifically trained one.  I have been educated to trust in practicality, not in love.  But I have also been trained to see whole systems, and the more I do that, the more I see that practicality and love are in fact the same thing.  What is love, but the ability to identify with someone or something beyond your own skin?  Love is the expansion of boundaries, the realization that another person, or family, or piece of land, or nation, or the whole earth is so intimately connected to you that your welfare and his, her, or its welfare are one and the same.

In truth, of course, we are all intimately interconnected with each other and with the earth.  We have always been.  Love has always been a practical idea, as well as a moral one.  Now it is not only practical but urgent.  It is time to accept the astonishing notion that to be rational, to ensure our own preservation, much less that of nature and of future generations, what is required of us is to be GOOD.  We have to look far into the future, react to signals before they come, care for and share the resources of the earth, and moderate our numbers and desires.  We have to create a culture that draws out of us not only our technical creativity, our entrepreneurial cleverness, our individualism, competitiveness, and cynicism, but also our wisdom and our goodness.

It can be done.  We can be patient with ourselves and others as we all confront a changing world.  We can empathize with resistance to change; there is some clinging to the ways of unsustainability within each of us.  We can include everyone in the challenge; everyone will be needed.  We can listen to the cynicism around us and pity those who indulge in it, but refuse to indulge in it ourselves.

The world can pass safely through the adventure of bringing itself to sustainability only if people view themselves and others with compassion.  That compassion is there, within all of us, just waiting to be used, the greatest resource of all, and one with no limits.

Operate from Love

This evening, I paused from the tyrannies of a never quite completed “to do” list, and a never quite empty “priority email inbox” to continue hanging more pictures, news-stories, and other artifacts that chronicle a long life. Among them was the obituary of “Scientist, Writer Donella Meadows,” who died on February 20, 2001. Dana was one of my mentors, as well as a collaborator. Along with Jay Forrester, Herbert Simon, my mother and father, my US Navy Captain, E.W. Ostlund, my global modeling mentor/collaborator Mike Mesarovic and a few others, her picture, taken not long before she died, has a place in the “mentors gallery” that I created to share with students during my years as Director of Doctoral Studies and then with faculty that I mentored during the years I directed American University’s Center For Teaching Excellence. Tonight, however, I found a picture of a younger Dana Meadows, taken at about the time we were working most closely together. As such pictures do it brought back many joyful memories – and the anguish of opportunities lost.

When I sat down at my computer, viewing Dana’s picture prompted me to look back through my files of her writings and correspondence. My search came to rest on the following passage. It is an important message to a troubled world from the conclusion of her coauthored book, Beyond the Limits, published in 1992.

It begins with the imperative, “Operate from Love” and continues….

One is not allowed to say that in public any more. Anyone who calls upon the human capacity for brotherly and sisterly love, generosity, compassion, will be met with a hail of cynicism. Once when I tried to do so, a high government official stood up to say, "Of all scarce resources, love is the scarcest."

I just don't believe that. Love is not a scarce resource, it is an untapped one. Our jazzed-up, hustling, quantitative culture does not know how to tap it, how to discuss it, or even what it means.

I am a child of that culture, and worse, a scientifically trained one. I have been educated to trust in practicality, not in love. But I have also been trained to see whole systems, and the more I do that, the more I see that practicality and love are in fact the same thing. What is love, but the ability to identify with someone or something beyond your own skin? Love is the expansion of boundaries, the realization that another person, or family, or piece of land, or nation, or the whole earth is so intimately connected to you that your welfare and his, her, or its welfare are one and the same.

In truth, of course, we are all intimately interconnected with each other and with the earth. We have always been. Love has always been a practical idea, as well as a moral one. Now it is not only practical but urgent. It is time to accept the astonishing notion that to be rational, to ensure our own preservation, much less that of nature and of future generations, what is required of us is to be GOOD. We have to look far into the future, react to signals before they come, care for and share the resources of the earth, and moderate our numbers and desires. We have to create a culture that draws out of us not only our technical creativity, our entrepreneurial cleverness, our individualism, competitiveness, and cynicism, but also our wisdom and our goodness.

It can be done. We can be patient with ourselves and others as we all confront a changing world. We can empathize with resistance to change; there is some clinging to the ways of unsustainability within each of us. We can include everyone in the challenge; everyone will be needed. We can listen to the cynicism around us and pity those who indulge in it, but refuse to indulge in it ourselves.

The world can pass safely through the adventure of bringing itself to sustainability only if people view themselves and others with compassion. That compassion is there, within all of us, just waiting to be used, the greatest resource of all, and one with no limits.

Remembering Dana Meadows on the 10th anniversary of her death

Yesterday (Monday February 21) was Dana (Donella) Meadows' 10th year death anniversary. A reminder of this transition appeared on my calendar. On this date, in past years, I have often shared one of Dana’s reflections on love, ethics or systems. But yesterday morning I heard a public radio piece on the arrival of the seed catalogues.

All her friends know that gardening was an important part of Dana’s life, and the arrival of the seed catalogues in frigid New Hampshire was an important, joyful, part of the garden cycle. I can remember the trays of seedlings that would appear on Foundation Farm’s first floor sleeping porch, catching the sun’s rays through the window. Later there might be almost too much garden to mulch, weed and cultivate.

In memory of Dana, here is David Mallett’s rendering of “The Garden Song”

Inch by inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

Gonna mulch it deep and low

Gonna make it fertile ground

Inch by inch, row by row

Please bless these seeds I sow

Please keep them safe below

'Till the rain comes tumbling down

Pullin' weeds and pickin' stones

We are made of dreams and bones

Need a place to call my own

'Cause the time is close at hand

Grain for grain, sun and rain

Find my way in nature's chain

Till my body and my brain

Tell the music of the land

CHORUS

Plant your rows straight and long

Season with a prayer and song

Mother Earth will make you strong

If you give her loving care

Reflections on "love."

My mother, certainly the most influential woman in my life, was sparing in her praise. I believe that child-rearing practices in the 1940s, when I was being reared, emphasized discipline rather than affirmation. And the world “love” almost never crossed her lips - at least in my presence. Apart from literary allusions - she could be the most vibrant, engaging conversationalist I have ever met - I only heard her use the word twice in serious conversation. Once she told me she believed I was “in love” with someone. Since we had never discussed such matters, I was dumbfounded at her perceptiveness. It was true. On another occasion, when I told her that I “loved” a difficult close relative we had in common, who was facing a crisis in her life, she responded “I don’t know what that would mean.” I know others whose use of the term is equally infrequent. Perhaps they believe that their “love” is like a precious jewel that would lose its value if reproduced in large quantities or a non-interest drawing savings account that would run a deficit if too many withdrawals were made. My mother said as much about her view of the matter, when I once asked her about this.

Christian marriage vows include promises to “love and honor” however I am convinced that most individuals making such pledges have little appreciation of what they might mean. Certainly this is true in the case of first marriages but frequently in the case of second or subsequent marriages as well. For many, perhaps most, a more descriptive pledge would be, “I promise to love and honor you, as long as we both shall live, so long as you fulfill my expectations.” Why is this so?

My thinking on the topic of “love” has been enriched by a distinction - between “love” and “attachment” that the Dalai Lama emphasizes in several of his books. Being “in love” which is the initial basis for most intimate relationships and, I believe, most decisions to marry, is almost always based on “attachment.” Attachment is significantly tied to physical attraction, but also, typically, to shared interests, congeniality, shared cultural compatibility and perhaps a need to feel loved and to feel secure. For women, especially in traditional societies, a stable income source to provide for themselves and children has also been a consideration, though this less true today. Attachment often involves dependence, which stifles authentic communication. This complicates the possibility of lasting relationships and lasting “love” still further. When circumstances change, attachment fades. “You are not the woman - or man - I married” one or both ‘partners’ will say or feel. This, of course, is inevitably true - not only of marriages but of any long-term close relationships.

“Compassion” is a term the Dalai Lama sometimes equates with love. In one of his writings he offers a powerful illustration. He tells of a monk who spent seventeen years in “a Chinese Gulag” where periodic torture was part of the regimen. Later they became friends. “On several occasions,” the monk recounted, “I faced serious danger.” “What was the danger?” the Dalai Lama asked. “Being unable to love and show compassion toward my Chinese guards” was the response. Mahatma Ghandi, believed that God was love and that oppressors should be loved, though not their evil deeds. A similar message is found in many quoted sayings of Jesus, chronicled in the Gospels of the Christian Bible. I common theme in all of these equates love with unconditional acceptance.

Perhaps my favorite passage on love is from a friend of many years, the late Donella (Dana) Meadows. Dana wrote:

Love is receiving someone in a space of total trust, openness, good will, acceptance.

I can take each person I know and rank them on a scale which is the degree of openness and love with which I receive them – the amount of careful attention I am willing to give them, the ability I have to be with them. Notice that the quality lies in me, not them.

Some people in my world are objects, which I have a fixed concept about and am not at all open to any information to the contrary.

I can change who they are just by opening myself to them.

What Dana is saying, in a somewhat more personal way, is similar to the wisdom offered by the Dalai Lama, by Buddha, Jesus, by Gandhi, by the monk who was released after 17 years of imprisonment and many others. The world around us and those who inhabit it are, in large degree, an artifact that we create. Should we wish to live in a world that is mostly inhabited by lovable people, and have such a “reality” be the basis for loving relationships, we have that choice.

An elementary schoolteacher's reflection on moral leadership

Among a number of responses to Dana Meadows column on moral leardership, the following, from an elementary school teacher, was one I found particularly compelling.

Thank you for sharing this with me.  Given the moral sleaze that seems to be so rampant in this current financial disaster Dana's thoughts are certainly as relevant now as they were when she wrote them.  I cannot recall a time in my life when examples of greed, and disregard for others, among people who were entrusted with other people's money, retirements, and in some cases the quality of life for so many, and they just blew it off for their own excessive personal greed.  I know that there are ethics classes in business schools, I wonder if they are required?  If not, then probably the only people who take them are the people who really don't need to, the people, as Dana says that knew "right from wrong all along."

As a teacher of young children, teaching ethics, is paramount, and woven into the tapestry of my everyday lessons, encounters, and mediations.  

Ending Hunger: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Many years ago, almost in another lifetime, I collaborated on a book entitled Ending Hunger an Idea Whose Time has Come.  Dana Meadows, about whose death anniversary I wrote earlier today, conceived the book.  At the time more than one million people had committed themselves to ending hunger by ‘enrolling’ in The Hunger Project.  Dana was a Hunger Project Board member and she enrolled me.  The book’s idea was that these committed people needed information, from experts, marshaled usefully, to translate their commitment into action. The story of Ending Hunger’s writing was a turbulent one, but of less interest than the book itself.  Work on the book consumed a major part of my life for several years but after it saw the light of day, I rarely looked at it.

Two days ago I did.  The occasion was preparation for a class in ‘spirituality and global politics’ in which I was guest lecturing.  I experienced the book as a beautiful, path breaking work that has stood the test of time.  It remains as a testimonial, albeit unacknowledged, to Dana Meadows vision and intellect.  It was intended to communicate a simple, powerful message that was true and needed when the book was written and is true and needed today. The message was this:

Hunger exists

It doesn’t need to. 

The people who are working hardest to end hunger are hungry people themselves.

Clearly we know enough to end hunger

There is little consensus about what to do - knowledge is important, but intention and will are more important.  They are  prerequisite  using knowledge in a way that makes a difference.

There is also something to be learned from book’s methodology - to have a dialogue you must understand the opposing point of view and be able to articulate it as well as your own