The Great Systems Thinker Donella Meadows

Comments by Randy Hayes, President for Rainforest Action Network, made on April 21, 2001, at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California, during a memorial for Donella “Dana” Meadows (1941 – 2001).

Rachael Carson was a great person. She had personal power. Some call it the power-of-one. Carson expressed her power in a book called Silent Spring.  Because of her work, we still have the beauty of songbirds in our lives.

John Muir, whose birthday is today, had personal power—the power-of-one. His legacy includes natural cathedrals such as Yosemite Valley. David Brower’s power-of-one halted giant dams. Because of it, we still have the Grand Canyon, another natural cathedral, blessing the earth.

Donella Meadows, like Rachel Carson and others, was a great person. But Donella, like all of us I suspect, struggled from time to time with a sense of powerlessness—that “drop in the bucket” feeling. Two steps forward and four steps backward as we ponder life and death issues and work for changes in societal systems. However, part of Donella’s legacy was an important strategy paper that can help us get our work done.

Her seven-page essay “Places to Intervene in a System,” though difficult for beginners in systems thinking, is wonderfully rewarding when read, reread, and studied.

Systems analysts, as Dana was, believe in leverage points through which small changes in one area produce big changes in everything in that system. One day Donella was at a meeting where the global trade regime of NAFTA, GATT, and the World Trade Organization was being explained. Realizing the wrongness of the growth direction, she was simmering inside. Arrogance was birthing a giant new system. They did not have the slightest idea of how it would behave ecologically. The Earth teaches us that all systems need to have self-correcting feedback loops to help them function well over time. She described the feedback loops in this “free trade” system with one word—PUNY!

In the midst of this meeting, she stomped up front, grabbed the flip chart, threw back a fresh page, and wrote, “Places to Intervene in a System.” She proceeded to list nine leverage points or intervention places. Each one was successively more effective at correcting malfunctioning systems. Out of that moment, the essay was birthed. For her, the document was not a recipe to fix all of our problems. It was “an invitation to think more broadly about system change.”

In my short time this morning, I can’t explain all nine leverage points or intervention places, but you can read or download a copy here.

In it, she identifies marvelous self-correcting mechanisms for society like:

• anti-trust laws
• truth in advertising laws
• internalizing costs such as using pollution taxes
• removing perverse incentives

She talks about how democracy worked better before the brainwashing power of centralized mass communication, giving us an insight into a key leverage point. In intervention point #3, she states that allowing a species or a human culture to go extinct is a “systems crime.” Intervention or leverage point #4 is about the rules of the system. The power to make the rules is real power. This is why industry lobbyists are lined up when Congress is in session and why she was so deeply concerned with corporate-led economic globalization.

Intervention point #5 is about information flows. Missing information is a common cause of system malfunction. Therefore, adding information into the system can be a powerful form of intervention. That’s why ten of us from Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network blockaded the entrance of the US Environmental Protection Agency two days ago. The banner read, “We Need a President that Protects the Planet Not the Polluters.” We were sending information into the system that an anti-environmental “president” such as Bush is unacceptable.

At the booth of an old movie theater in San Francisco there were the usual listings of ticket prices for children, students, and adults. The price next to the student category was marked out. Written beside it was the phrase, “We are all students.”

Donella Meadows was a great student. That helped her to be a great teacher as well. As a student, she was always going deeper and asking the question why? As a teacher, she was always prodding her students to ask the question why? In her actual professorial duties marking up student papers in red ink, I’m told it was not uncommon to have “why?” written in several places on the paper—and nothing else!

Donella Meadows was also a scientist. But she knew that the “game” wasn’t about nitpicking over facts. You have got to be going deeper to discover for yourself: what is life really about? Why are we on this planet? Out of answering these questions for yourself, finding that short list of ethics, goals, or values—real meaning emerges. From that a meaningful plan, your plan of action, can emerge.

It is so important to ACT on our plans of action. We do not want to be lying on our own deathbed feeling that we fiddled while Rome burned. Donella was no fiddler. Are you doing everything possible? Are you articulating, repeating, standing for, insisting upon, and modeling new ways for society?

Donella Meadows was not just a woman with a profound understanding of life.

More importantly, she was a woman who:

• articulated
• repeated
• stood for
• insisted upon and
• modeled a new set of systems goals for society.

Today is about honoring Dana. But it is also about rededicating ourselves to emulate the qualities in her that we saw. Because it is not just the power-of-one from great people such as Rachael Carson or Donella Meadows that counts. It is the passionate power-of-one from each of us in this room, thousands that we know, and millions around the world that will ensure we build that better world that Dana helped us to dream about and to understand.