When I posted yesterday in Does environmentalism have a vision? that environmentalism doesn’t have a vision, I linked to a post on Donella Meadows’ page, Envisioning a Sustainable World. It didn’t present a vision, I didn’t find it readable, and it said things like:
Environmentalists have failed perhaps more than any other set of advocates to project vision.
…
The best goal most of us who work toward sustainability offer is the avoidance of catastrophe. We promise survival and not much more. That is a failure of vision.
so I counted it as more evidence of the lack of vision from environmentalism.
For those who don’t know, she coauthored one of the most important and best selling books on the environment, Limits to Growth. I consider the 30th anniversary edition the science book of the 2000–10 decade. She also wrote Thinking In Systems, which I assigned when I taught a class in systems thinking at NYU and recommend to anyone, especially considering leading groups.
After posting, I clicked to watch the video, which I recommend. She acknowledges the problem in the lack of a vision. She describes the friction environmentalists gave her in stating a vision. She also described overcoming that resistance and finding its source. Then she leads the audience through an exercise to develop a vision.
I recommend trying her vision exercise. Since I’m not an environmentalist, I came up with a different vision than she prompted, but still came up with something I wouldn’t have, which I valued.
She died at 59 in 2001, too young, too soon. I couldn’t help looking her up and found some videos I downloaded but haven’t yet watched but am so confident that I’ll find them valuable and insightful beyond most videos that I’m linking to them here. Also I read some comments, which all praised her work.
If you find the space below empty some time after I posted, it means they didn’t live up to my confidence after I watched them. If they remain, it means I recommend them.
and