Great Lives

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Factual: Life Stories

Biographical series in which guests choose someone who has inspired their lives.

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Great Lives: Kate Raworth on Donella Meadows

Kate Raworth on Donella Meadows

BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Kate Raworth on Donella Meadows

Economist Kate Raworth chooses the Environmental Scientist Donella 'Dana' Meadows

Environmental scientist Donella Meadows wrote the 1972 Limits to Growth report and Thinking in Systems.

Born in Illinois in 1941, Dana Meadows studied Chemistry and Molecular Biology, before turning her back on a post doc position at Harvard, to pursue environmentalism. 

She joined her husband Dennis Meadows as part of the team working on Professor Jay Forester's World3 computer model of the world economy at MIT and wrote the report on the results of that model, which predicted overshoot and collapse if economic growth were not curbed. The report, called Limits to Growth, was published in 1972 to much publicity, alarm and ridicule. 

Donella said "We were at MIT. We had been trained in science. The way we thought about the future was utterly logical: if you tell people there’s a disaster ahead, they will change course. If you give them a choice between a good future and a bad one, they will pick the good. They might even be grateful. Naive, weren’t we?" 

Following the publication of Limits to Growth, Dana dedicated her life to living by the principles of sustainability (a word coined by the Limits to Growth team) and to teaching the principles of 'systems' thinking, which she believed could help people understand and live more harmoniously with the planet.

Choosing Dana is Economist Kate Raworth, who believes that economics needs a broader, more holistic model to be fit for the 21st century.  To this end, she founded the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which champions regenerative and distributive economics, that can meet the needs of people within the means of the living planet. Kate never met Dana, but felt an immediate kinship when she picked up her book, Thinking in Systems, and now believes that all children should be taught to think about the balancing and reinforcing loops of systems. 

Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Ellie Richold.

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