Donella Meadows

Donella Hager "Dana" Meadows (March 13, 1941 – February 20, 2001) was an American environmental scientist, educator, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the books *The Limits to Growth* and *Thinking In Systems: A Primer*. Born in Elgin, Illinois, Meadows was educated in science, receiving a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963 and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1968. She taught at Dartmouth College for 29 years, beginning in 1972. Meadows was honored as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment (1991) and as a MacArthur Fellow (1994). She wrote "The Global Citizen," a weekly column on world events from a systems point of view. In 1972, Meadows was on the MIT team that produced the global computer model "World3" for the Club of Rome, providing the basis for *The Limits to Growth*. The book reported a study of long-term global trends in population, economics, and the environment. In 1982, Donella and Dennis Meadows created the Balaton Group, an international "network of networks" for leading researchers on resource use, environmental conservation, systems modeling, and sustainability. Meadows founded the Sustainability Institute in 1996, which combined research in global systems with practical demonstrations of sustainable living. In 1990, Meadows published the State of the Village report under the title, "Who lives in the 'Global Village'?" In 1999, Meadows published *Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System*, one of her best-known essays. Donella Meadows was married to Dennis Meadows. She died of cerebral meningitis in 2001 at the age of 59.