Dana Meadows: thinking globally, acting locally

INTRODUCTION Dana Meadows: Thinking globally, actinglocallyJohn D. Sterman*

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of System Dynamics Review dedicated to the memory ofDana Meadows. It reviews her role as a leader in the fields of environmental journalism, systemdynamics, and systems analysis, and summarizes the articles in the special issue. Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Syst. Dyn. Rev. 18, 101–107, (2002)

Photo by Stuart Bratesman, Dartmouth College

This special issue of System Dynamics Review is dedicated to the memoryof Dana Meadows, who passed away unexpectedly in February 2001, fromcomplications of meningitis. She was 59.

Some of you knew Dana and more of you know her work, but I suspect manyothers, particularly those relatively new to the field of system dynamics, do

Ł John D. Sterman, System Dynamics Group, Sloan School of Management, M.I.T, 30 Wadsworth Street, RoomE53-351, Cambridge MA 02142, U.S.A.; E-mail: [email protected]

System Dynamics Review Vol. 18, No. 2, (Summer 2002): 101–107 Received August 2001DOI: 10.1002/sdr.234 Accepted March 2002Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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102 System Dynamics Review Volume 18 Number 2 Summer 2002

not. She was known primarily for her award-winning newspaper column, TheGlobal Citizen, and as a leading environmentalist. Of course, she was also theprincipal author of the most famous system dynamics study of all time, TheLimits to Growth.

Though she rarely came to our conferences or published in System DynamicsReview, she was one of the most important members of our community.1 Thusit is fitting that we celebrate her life and work with this special issue.

You may think of Dana primarily as a writer. She was a wonderful writer.But she was also a disciplined scientist and a talented, insightful modelbuilder. She developed the population sector of the World3 model, integratingbiological, social, cultural and economic factors in an endogenous account offertility, aging, and mortality; in my view the best demographic model of itstime, and still worthy of study today (Meadows et al. 1974). Her other booksand scholarly writings also form core works in the education of any modeler,any systems thinker. In rereading some of her work since her death I wasstruck by how deeply she affected the way I see the world, by how many of theconcepts, examples, and stories I use in my own teaching are really hers.

I first met Dana, and Dennis, in 1973 when I was a freshman at Dartmouth.The encounter changed my life. I switched my major to system dynamics, andspent as much time working with them as I could. Dana and Dennis wereamazingly generous with their time, with advice, with well-deserved criticism,with the opportunity for hard work on the farm, with friendship, support, andlove. What is most remarkable, I was not at all unique—there were many likeme, many for whom Dana was the best teacher we ever had, our inspiration,the reason we do what we do.

In one of my favorite passages in Industrial Dynamics (1961), Jay Forrestercalls for courage, saying, ‘‘The solutions to small problems yield small rewards. . . The goal [of system dynamics] should be to find management policies andorganizational structures that lead to greater success.’’

Dana had courage. She grappled with the most immense, most difficult, mostuniversal problems, problems of ecological and economic sustainability, ofequity and social justice, of leadership and transformation—nothing less thanthe fate of humanity on earth. Focused clearly on the creation of a sustainableworld, she endured storms of criticism, much of it shockingly hostile, personal,and just plain nasty, while remaining hopeful, constructive, and effective. Butshe also had courage in her personal life. She resigned her tenured positionat Dartmouth to pursue her work as a writer, not a common career move foran academic, and she did so with, by her own account, no special knowledgeof journalism or the difficulties of writing a weekly newspaper column. Shefaced and survived cancer, not only overcoming the disease, but challengingthe machine of modern medicine to treat patients as people. More recently sheleft the farm she had lovingly built up over 19 years to start a new community,a new farm, and a new institute, all from scratch.

J. D. Sterman: Dana Meadows: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally 103

More than anyone I have ever met, Dana lived by the famous systems credo,‘‘Think Globally, Act Locally.’’ In her columns she wrote of the damage to theearth and its inhabitants caused by pesticides, herbicides, and factory farming.At home she was an organic farmer. From her sheep came wool she carded,dyed, spun, and knit into beautiful sweaters, socks, mittens, and more. The farmyielded a bounty of the most delicious food; the waste made compost and fedthe chickens; their eggs nourished the people; the chicken manure enrichedthe garden. She truly closed the loop. She wrote of the loss of America’sfarms and forests to strip malls and McMansions, then created a land trust inher community, putting thousands of acres, including her own farm, foreverbeyond the reach of development. She wrote of the costs of globalization, therelentless substitution of mass consumption for community and connectionbetween people. For decades she lived in a communal household, and, justa few years ago, embarked on an even more ambitious experiment, a newcohousing community, Cobb Hill, located on an old Vermont dairy farm andnow home to dozens of folks, all living lightly on the land. She wrote eloquentlyabout the evils of overconsumption. At home, she spent little on herself, livingon an annual income most of us would view as impossibly impoverished.Writing about the limits to population and economic growth, she chose notto have children, instead nurturing a huge family of students, colleagues,housemates, and friends.

Though I saw her far too rarely, her influence was—is—constant. I know I amnot the only one for whom Dana played and plays this role. John Richardson,professor of international relations at American University in Washington andfrequent collaborator and coauthor with Dana, wrote to me that:

Another of [Dana’s] ideals, perhaps even more central to the System DynamicsSociety, pertained to modeling practice. Dana’s unusually high level of integrity inall things extended to this and set a standard for all who knew her. On occasionswhen I might be tempted to cut corners in modeling work (what modeler hasn’t facedthese), envisioning Dana across the table, posing her gentle but piercing queries wasone of the things that helped keep me honest.

Just so. When my professional work and also my personal life present me withdifficulties, with the temptation to avoid the difficult path, I usually ask myselfwhat Dana would do. Though I often fall short of her ideals, she remains notonly a professional inspiration, but a moral beacon as well.

When Limits to Growth was published, Dana and other members of themodeling team were derided as doomcryers and pessimists. The great ironyof these misguided and self-serving jabs is that Dana was an irrepressibleoptimist. For her the glass was never half-empty. She rejected such simplisticdualities, instead showing us that the glass is part of a larger system, andhow, with enough cooperation, the flow that fills the glass could be managedsustainably and equitably to satisfy the thirst of all. Of course, she had her


dark moments and doubts. The enormity of the world’s injustices and self-destructiveness sometimes weighed on her shoulders. She once quoted thegreat conservationist Aldo Leopold (1993), who lamented that:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a worldof wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. Anecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences ofscience are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of deathin a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Dana never hardened her shell. A careful scientist herself, she arguedpassionately that the consequences of science were everyone’s business. Shetoo saw the marks of death in our global community, and, though many didnot want to be told, constructively, eloquently, and persistently told us. As adoctor of the human condition on this planet she never deceived us about theseriousness of our situation. But she never gave in to the easy fatalism thatafflicts many environmentalists and so often undercuts their effectiveness. Herbedside manner always gave us hope and strengthened our will to recover.After an evening with her you not only felt it was possible to create a sustainableworld, you wanted to be a part of it, and you came away with more energythan ever to work towards it. In the challenge of creating a sustainable societyDana saw limitless opportunity for greater personal growth, connection, andjoy. That joy, that faith in the essential goodness of people, was infectious.

She wrote about that faith in the final chapter of Beyond the Limits (Meadowset al. 1992). She first details all the ways scientific analysis, modeling, andexperimentation can help create a sustainable society. But, she says, ‘‘Likerecycling, they are useful, necessary, and not enough.’’ True to her ownprinciples, she goes on to admit her own doubts, then boldly steps outside theboundaries of normal scientific discourse:

We don’t know what will be enough. But we would like to conclude . . . by mentioningfive other tools we have found helpful, not as the ways to work toward sustainability,but as some ways that have been useful to us. We are a bit hesitant to discuss thembecause we are not experts in their use and because they require the use of wordsthat do not come easily from the mouths or word processors of scientists. They areconsidered too ‘‘soft’’ to be taken seriously in the cynical public arena. They are:visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving.

After describing the first four, she turns to the last, and, for her, the mostimportant:

It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, orsolidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared forlesser human qualities. But we try, and we urge you to try. Be patient with yourselfand others as you and they confront the difficulty of a changing world. Understand


and empathize with inevitable resistance; there is some resistance, some clinging tothe ways of unsustainability, within each of us. Include everyone in the new world.Everyone will be needed. Seek out and trust in the best human instincts in yourselfand in everyone. Listen to the cynicism around you and pity those who believe it,but don’t believe it yourself.

Finally, she confronts the difficult balance between complacency and despair:

Is any change . . . really possible? Can the world actually ease down below the limitsand avoid collapse? Is there enough time? . . . The truth is that no one knows. . . . [T]heworld faces not a preordained future, but a choice. The choice is between models. Onemodel says that this finite world for all practical purposes has no limits. Choosingthat model will take us even further beyond the limits and, we believe, to collapse.

Another model says that the limits are real and close, and that there is not enoughtime, and that people cannot be moderate or responsible or compassionate. Thatmodel is self-fulfilling. If the world chooses to believe it, the world will get to beright, and the result will also be collapse.

Dana could not accept either of these formulations, and, characteristically,created a third way:

A third model says that the limits are real and close, and that there is just exactlyenough time, with no time to waste. There is just exactly enough energy, enoughmaterials, enough money, enough environmental resilience, and enough humanvirtue to bring about a revolution to a better world.

At the memorial service at Dartmouth College, held on Earth Day 2001,speaker after speaker noted that Dana would have been embarrassed by all theattention and praise, the gratitude and thanks. She would have thanked othersfor supporting and strengthening her, and would rather we all went back towork in the gardens and fields, in the classrooms and boardrooms, to buildwhat she called a ‘‘sufficient, sustainable, fair, and wonderful future.’’

So to honor her spirit, in this special issue we present papers by a few ofher many colleagues and former students carrying on her work. First, DennisMeadows writes about Dana’s work bringing system dynamics to the public,highlighting her continuing relevance to the field of system dynamics. GeraldBarney then describes Dana’s role in shaping his work, first as director of theGlobal 2000 Report to the President, the first comprehensive assessment ofthe US government’s global modeling capabilities, and the work he has donesince to aid nations and institutions such as the World Bank develop a moresystemic approach to development and planning.

Next, Krys Stave explores the use of interactive and participative modelingto engage multiple stakeholders in contentious environmental issues throughher work on the critical problems of traffic congestion, air pollution, anddevelopment in rapidly growing Las Vegas, Nevada. Krys draws on the


principles Dana taught to develop both a model and a process helping diverseinterest groups learn together and shape government action. Don Seville andDrew Jones explore a similar approach in their work with different stakeholdersin the ‘‘Northern Forest’’—26 million acres in the northeast United States.Working with Dana through the Sustainability Institute, a ‘‘think-do tank’’she created a few years ago to apply system dynamics and other tools to thedevelopment of a sustainable society, Don and Drew describe the challengesto the sustainability of the northern forest and the industries it supports. Theyalso describe lessons they learned from Dana about working with stakeholderswith divergent views and values, and how to respond to the denial and despairpeople often experience when confronting difficult social and environmentalissues.

Shifting from regional issues to global concerns, Linda Booth Sweeney andI describe experiments assessing how well people understand the basic stockand flow structure governing the climate and global warming. Distressingly, wefind many highly educated graduate students lack even basic understandingof the structure and dynamics of the climate. They significantly underestimatethe inertia of the system, leading to the erroneous belief that it is prudent towait and see if warming causes more damage to our ecosystems and economybefore taking action. The experiments confirm what Dana saw long ago—theimportance of broad-based public education in the fundamentals of systemsthinking to enhance our intuition and help us find the high leverage pointsfor effective interventions. Moving from mental to formal models of climatechange, Tom Fiddaman describes his integrated climate-economy model anduses it to analyze policies to reduce emissions including the Kyoto Accord,emissions permits markets, and carbon taxes. Following the principles Danataught, his model has a broad boundary, endogenously treating technologicalchange, energy resources, production, prices, technology, emissions, and theclimate. Tom shows that expanding the narrow boundaries and relaxing theunrealistic assumptions of other models alters optimal policy to favor strongerand earlier action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The final paper is an excerpt from The Electronic Oracle, (Meadows andRobinson, 1985) a book Dana wrote with Jenny Robinson, now on the facultyof Murdoch University in Australia. Electronic Oracle investigates the practiceand impact of systems analysis and computer modeling. Dana and Jennyexplore the nature of models, the biases and limitations of different modelingmethods, the pragmatics of the modeling process, and the impact of modelingon the real world. The methods they developed to expose hidden assumptions,to make undiscussable values and biases discussable, remain central to anyoneseeking to use modeling effectively or to have an impact on the real world.The book both anticipated and shaped important developments in the field ofsystem dynamics, including the focus on ‘‘modeling for learning,’’ group modelbuilding, and the systems thinking and organizational learning movements. Yetdespite welcome advances in hardware, software, and modeling methods since


the book was written, we have not yet realized the authors’ vision of a world inwhich modelers are not only more scientific and rigorous, but ‘‘compassionate,humble, open-minded, responsible, self-insightful, and committed.’’

Finally, I have included one of Dana’s Global Citizen columns between eachof the articles.

You will find in the papers here Dana’s commitment to the highest standardsof scientific method and honest inquiry, her willingness to challenge deeplyheld assumptions—including her own, her remarkable empathy for all peopleand all life, her passion to make a better world, and, above all, her faith thatwe can do it.

Acknowledgments

Many people helped make this special issue possible. I am particularly grateful to allthe authors, for their excellent papers and tolerance of deadline pressure. Thanks arealso due to Nelson Repenning, Anjali Sastry, and my colleagues at MIT, to the refereesand editors, particularly Brian Dangerfield, and to Diane Taylor and John Wiley andSons. Special thanks to Diana Wright and the entire staff of the Sustainability Institutefor advice, support, and permission to reprint Dana’s columns.

Note

1. Dana published one article in the Review (Meadows 1989). It remainscentral for any modeler who seeks to communicate effectively. One ofher Global Citizen columns was also reprinted in these pages (Meadows1987).

References

Forrester JW. 1961. Industrial Dynamics. MA Press: Cambridge, MA. Now availablefrom Pegasus Communications: Waltham, MA.

Leopold A. 1993. Round River. Oxford University Press: New York, p. 165; seegargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/chrisj/leopold-quotes.html.

Meadows DH. 1987. Break the cycle: poverty causes population growth causes poverty.System Dynamics Review 3(1): 34–35.

Meadows DH. 1989. System Dynamics meets the press. System Dynamics Review 5(1):68–80.

Meadows DH, Meadows DL, Randers J. 1992. Beyond the Limits: Confronting GlobalCollapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Chelsea Green: Post Mills, VT,pp. 234–236.

Meadows DH, Meadows DL, Randers J, Behrens WW III. 1974. Dynamics of Growth ina Finite World. Wright-Allen press: Cambridge, MA. Now available from PegasusCommunications: Waltham, MA.

Meadows DH, Robinson JM. 1985. The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and SocialDecisions. Wiley: Chichester.

Documents

Dana Meadows: thinking globally, acting locally