Keep that coincidence cap handy -- there are a lot of coincidences.
I wasn't aware of DU at the time -- perhaps you all have discussed this before?
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Published on Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Global Citizen
Donella Meadows, Lead Author of The Limits to Growth, Has Died
Donella H. Meadows, 59, a pioneering environmental scientist and writer, died Tuesday in New Hampshire after a 2-week battle with bacterial meningitis.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0221-01.htm~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Donella Meadows (1941-2001) Obituary prepared by the Balaton Group
http://www.newdream.org/meadowsobit.html Donella H. Meadows, 59, a pioneering environmental scientist and writer, died Tuesday in New Hampshire after a brief illness. She was best known to the world as the lead author of the international best selling book The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. The book, which reported on a study of long-term global trends in population, economics, and the environment, sold millions of copies and was translated into 28 languages. She was also the lead author of the twenty-year follow-up study, Beyond the Limits (1992), with original co-authors Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers. Professor Meadows, known as “Dana” to friends and colleagues, was a leading voice in what has become known as the “sustainability movement,” an international effort to reverse damaging trends in the environment, economy, and social systems. Her work is widely recognized as a formative influence on hundreds of other academic studies, government policy initiatives, and international agreements.
Dana Meadows was also a devoted teacher of environmental systems, ethics, and journalism to her students at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she taught for 29 years. In addition to her many original contributions to systems theory and global trend analysis, she managed a small farm and was a vibrant member of her local community. Genuinely unconcerned with her international fame, she often referred to herself simply as “a farmer and a writer.”
...In 1972 she was on the MIT team that produced the global computer model “World3” for the Club of Rome and provided the basis for The Limits to Growth. The book made headlines around the world, and began a debate about the limits of the Earth’s capacity to support human economic expansion, a debate that continues to this day. Her writing - appearing most often in the form of a weekly column called The Global Citizen, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 -- has been published regularly in the international press since that time. In 1981, together with her former husband Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows founded the International Network of Resource Information Centers (INRIC), also called the Balaton Group (after the lake in Hungary where the group meets annually).
The group built early and critical avenues of exchange between scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. As the Balaton Group’s coordinator for eighteen years, she facilitated what grew to become an unusually effective global process of information sharing and collaboration among hundreds of leading academics, researchers, and activists in the broader sustainability movement. Professor Meadows also served on many national and international boards and scientific committees, and taught and lectured all over the world. She was recognized as a 1991 Pew Scholar and as a 1994 MacArthur Fellow for her work. In 1992 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) presented her with an honorary doctorate. In 1997, Professor Meadows founded the Sustainability Institute, which she described as a “think-do-tank.” The Institute combines cutting edge research in global systems with practical demonstrations of sustainable living, including the development of an ecological village and organic farm in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont. ...
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http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2001022201072Dartmouth Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies Donella Meadows died Tuesday of bacterial meningitis. Meadows, 59, was hospitalized at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center two weeks earlier, battling the
rare and usually treatable disease. ...Her 1972 international best-seller, The Limits to Growth, placed her as one of the leading experts in the sustainability movement, which aims to reduce damaging global trends in human population and environmental degradation. She also managed an organic farm and wrote a weekly newspaper column, "The Global Citizen," which in 1991 earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination. ...According to faculty and students, Meadows' amazing and inspiring presence will be sorely missed, not only at Dartmouth but throughout the world. "Everyone is very sad, not just in the Environmental Studies program, but all over the Dartmouth campus, the Upper Valley, U.S., and throughout the world," Professor of Environmental Studies and Environmental Studies chair Andrew Friedland said. Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Environmental Studies James Hornig, who hired Meadows back in 1972, called her the most inspiring person he ever knew. "Over the past 24 hours I've probably looked at 50 email messages that came from people all over the world who knew her, and I think 'love' appeared in every one of them," Hornig said. According to Friedland, "Dana was beloved by her students; they were just passionate about her," and not one passed through her classes unaffected. Although Hannah Jacobs '02 was Meadows' student for only one month of this term, she said she's never had a teacher change her life as much in so short a time. "She made me look at life in a different way," through her inspiring message and alternative teaching methods, Jacobs said. ..."She was willing to speak out on all kinds of important issues, and had the background of a scientist but the understanding of a journalist, and above all, enormous love of humanity," Hornig said.
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IN MEMORIAM: DONELLA MEADOWS
Environmental advocate Donella H. Meadows, co-author of the influential LIMITS TO GROWTH report in 1972, died of bacterial meningitis on February 20 in New Hampshire. She was 59.
The report, prepared by the Club of Rome, stated that civilization could no longer support the rapid industrialization and growth patterns of the previous century, and the authors recommended "deliberate checks" on both population growth and economic development in order to rescue the planet's environment and resource bases. The New York Times predicted the report was "likely to be one of the most important documents of our age"; it sold 9 million copies and was translated into 28 languages.
Meadows was a 1994 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. She wrote or co-wrote several more books, including BEYOND THE LIMITS (Chelsea Green, 1992), and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, "The Global Citizen." At the time of her death, she was an adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Dartmouth College.
Perhaps it is poetic justice that, in the week of Donella's unfortunate passing, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the summary findings of their third assessment report, which fully vindicates THE LIMITS TO GROWTH and confirms many of its findings and arguments almost to the letter, writes Seth Itzkan, co-director of the Boston Chapter of the World Future Society....
http://www.wfs.org/futupmar01.htm~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Editorial
Donella Meadows 1942-2001
http://wvhc.drw.net/VoiceMar01/Editorial.Mar2001Voice.htmPeople with a reasonably well-developed conscience, and the intelligence and sensitivity to have an accurate world view on the environmental state of the planet, tend to suffer despair these days. ...(Donella) must have felt a terrible burden to commit her every waking hour to doing the best she could to try and head off what she saw as impending doom. She was getting precious little help -- there were tens of thousands of her fellow human critters hell bent on destroying the planet through exploitation, and millions of "deadbeats" who had a glimmer of what was happening but chose to do nothing about it. Unfortunately, too many of the truly wise persons today like Dana are in Cassandra roles and must feel the full frustration of it.
In more recent months, perhaps in reaction to finding our nation being pushed by our new national leadership into the abyss of perdition, she began to take the gloves off so to speak. I was delighted when she assumed a more angry posture in a recent column about this leadership, and actually said in conclusion, "But the point of it - okay here’s the point - the point is, this political system sucks. The issues and concerns of the people are squeezed out by the issues and concerns of the centralized money-makers. The country runs on money-making at the expense of all other purposes and values." In an even more recent column, alerted to the probable demise of the polar bear because of the loss of the arctic ice sheets, one could almost feel that she was fighting for her emotional life with more and more extreme bad environmental news coming in daily. "Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year old (referring to the fact that the three-year olds of the world are already laden with man-made toxins stored in their bodies)
"Heck, I don’t know. There’s only one thing I do know. If we believe that it’s effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and shortsighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUV’s while they last - that’s the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.
"Personally, I don’t believe that stuff at all. I don’t see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year olds in our world. We are not helpless and the is nothing wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and for ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts and souls."
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Wednesday, August 7, 2002
Meningitis victim feels 'much better'
by Charles Gardner, The Dartmouth Staff
The Dartmouth Online
/http/www.thedartmouth.com/article.php%3Faid%3D200208070101
Kelly Cameron '04 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis this weekend and taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center for treatment, where she was listed in satisfactory condition yesterday.
Cameron left intensive care on Monday and is "progressing very well," according to DHMC spokesperson Deborah Kimbell. ..."This is a terrifying illness, but I don't think students are at any higher risk of developing it than last week or two weeks ago," he said.
Meningitis, a disease that causes inflammation of the lining of the spinal cord and brain, is "in general not very contagious," Turco said. He explained that the illness instead periodically "pops up" in isolated incidents, with little clue to as to why it strikes certain people or places.
Though the disease can prove deadly if not detected in its early stages, Turco said in this case "the student was treated in time" for antibiotics to prove fully effective. ...
The meningitis bacteria cannot survive for long outside the body, Turco said, so only those who may have had "intimate contact" with the student were given the medication. Currently, Kimbell said, "doctors are feeling very good about her prospects" and are hoping that Cameron will "be up and walking around a little bit" today. Surprisingly, the student had received the meningitis vaccine, according to Wondowski, but Turco said the current vaccine does not guarantee immunity.
"It doesn't work 100 percent of the time, but it's the best we have as of now," he said. ...Adults contract the disease only rarely, he said, as people generally will have built up antibodies to the meningococcus bacteria by later in life. The bacteria itself is present in benign form in up to 40 percent of people at any given time.
On a national scale,
meningitis is an uncommon disease, striking only one person out of 100,000, though Turco said there is a "slight increase" in incidence among college-age students. Despite the relative rarity of the illness, Dartmouth has lost two of its own to meningitis over the past three years.
...
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