Donella Meadows Revisited - Future Observatory Journal

The context is also upbeat—the centers are full of concrete and useful information about how these values actually can be achieved. They know the potentials of their regions for sustainable fruitfulness, and they talk about opportunities as well as obstacles.

Out of that combination came a vision of a number of centers where information and models about resources and the environment are housed. There would need to be many of these centers , all over the world, each one responsible for a discrete bioregion.

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The job of these centers is basically to enhance that capacity that Vernon and John talked of, the capacity to solve problems in ways that are consistent with the culture and the environment. The centers collect, make sense of, and disseminate information about the resources of their bioregions, and about the welfare of the people and of the ecosys... See more

They would contain people with excellent minds and tools, but they would not be walled off, as scientific centers so often are, either from the lives of ordinary people or from the realities of political processes. The people in these centers would be at home with farmers, miners, planners, and heads of state and they would be able both listen to a... See more

First Vernon said:

Each agroeconomic region is so unique that the concept of transfer of technology is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the transfer of the capacity to develop technology and institutions that are consistent with the cultural endowment and the resource endowment of each region. Until that’s done, a sustained solution to the problems of... See more

Helping people and cultures all over the world develop and express their own capacity to solve their own problems, consistent with their own needs and with the ecosystems around them. And doing that through enhancing the power within all cultures and peoples to combine intellectual knowing and intuitive knowing, reasoning about the earth and living... See more

The centers serve their particular regions, but they are also joined together, through their own informal network. They exchange methods and data with each other. People flow back and forth, to be trained, to spread news, to report on the state of their own part of the planet. When necessary,

centers can join together to work on issues or problems ... See more

This vision is obviously still very much in the making. We do not know exactly how to serve the network together properly, whether we should let it expand so fast, or how to pay for it next year. The tasks we have undertaken will take years, but they have the potential to transform the way people all over the world think about their resources and t... See more

Each person needs to be the bearer of the kind of knowledge that allows that person to be a steward of the planet.