----------forwarded message----------

> Dear Friends,
>
> I have some very sad news.
>
> Donella Dana Meadows, the author of Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits,
> Director of the Sustainability Institute, and Adjunct Professor of
> Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, died today.
>
> Dana had been in a coma for roughly the last two weeks, resulting from a
> meningitis infection. During her last hours, she was surrounded by her friends
> and loved ones.
>
> If you knew Dana personally, or were inspired by her work, please spend a
> moment to think about her today. Dana was a very special person, who inspired
> and touched many people around the world. We will all feel her loss, and share
> our collective grief.
>
> Regards, Jon
>
> --  Jon Foley, Director Center for Sustainability and the Global
> Environment (SAGE) Institute for Environmental Studies
> University of Wisconsin
> 1225 West Dayton Street Madison, WI 53706 USA
> http://sage.aos.wisc.edu +1 (608) 265-9199
> ----------

Donella Meadows; Co-Wrote Book on Global Environmental Collapse

By MARLA CONE, Times Environmental Writer

Donella Meadows, who co-wrote a 1972 bestseller that predicted global
ecological collapse and galvanized the neophyte environmental movement, has
died at the age of 59.

An author and adjunct professor at Dartmouth College,
Meadows spent 30 years crusading for sustainable use of the Earth's
resources. She died Tuesday at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in
Hanover, N.H., after a two-week hospitalization for bacterial meningitis.

Environmentalists called Meadows a visionary who was able to foresee the
risks of a boundless population and appetite for energy.
Meadows was the principal author of "The Limits to Growth," in which she and
other Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists used computer
modeling to predict what would happen to the Earth in the 21st century if
trends in population, fuel use, food production and pollution continued.
Many dire predictions failed to materialize, but experts say that is the
result, in part, of the world's heeding the warnings in the landmark book,
which sold 9 million copies.

"She was one of the provocative and original thinkers, and
yet she was always willing to change her mind, which great thinkers are not
always willing to do," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra
Club.

Despite her doomsday predictions, Meadows was an optimist who refused
in her writings to see people as fatally flawed or the Earth as doomed. And
despite her idealism, she also was a realist. In recent years Meadows had
moderated what she called her "holy war," acknowledging that a revolution in
the way people treat the environment will take centuries and require
enormous sacrifices.

"We humans, even at our collective worst or best, are nowhere near powerful
enough to destroy a whole planet or to save it," she wrote in 1990.

The 1972 book, written with then-husband Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen
Randers, created a sensation by advocating "deliberate checks" on
economic and population growth. The predictions spurred heated debate.

On the book's 20th anniversary, Meadows discussed the predictions, saying
many had come true, but in different degrees. The book projected, for
example, that oil supplies would run out within 100 years.

"We underestimated the amount of energy efficiency that the world would
adopt over 20 years. That was a good thing that happened," Meadows said in
1992.

Population also didn't grow as rapidly as the authors projected. Instead of
doubling to 7 billion by 2000, as the authors predicted, worldwide
population reached 6 billion.

Born in Elgin, Ill., Meadows earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from
Carleton College in Minnesota and a doctorate in biophysics
from Harvard. She had been a professor at Dartmouth since 1972.

She received a $320,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, as
well as a grant from the Pew Foundation. She wrote nine other books,
including a 20-year update of "The Limits to Growth," and a syndicated
newspaper column, "The Global Citizen."

She tried to heed her own warnings. She lived for 27 years on an organic
farm in New Hampshire and in 1999 helped found the Cobb Hill
"eco-village" in Vermont.

But in recent years she realized the hypocrisy--even humor--of trying to
live in modern society without leaving a scar on the planet.

"For a while, I was a self-righteous eco-snob, the kind that gives rise to
the stereotype," she said in a 1999 opinion piece for The Times. "I banished
synthetics and went around in wrinkled cotton clothes. I pointedly passed up
the meat at dinner parties. I wasn't kind to people with more than two
children. If you know folks like that, have patience with them. They won't
be able to keep it up very long."

Meadows wrote that she realized "there's no way to live an ecologically pure
life in an industrial society. Compromises are inevitable. My own
contradictions are blatant."

She wrote in 1999 that her new mission was to launch an "honest experiment"
to be Earth-friendly, with room for mistakes and contradictions. "Once I
forgave myself," she wrote, "I could forgive the rest of the human race."

Meadows is survived by her mother, Phebe Quist, of Tahlequah, Okla.; her
father, Don Hager of Palatine, Ill.; and a brother, Jason Hager of
Waterford, Wis.
----------
* * * Times staff writer Gary Polakovic contributed to this story.

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