---
id: people/donella-meadows
about:
  label: Donella H. Meadows
  description: >-
    American environmental scientist (1941 to 2001), lead author of The Limits
    to Growth and of Thinking in Systems, known for her list of leverage points.
  tags:
    - system dynamics
    - systems thinking
    - leverage points
person:
  affiliation: Dartmouth College
  role: environmental scientist and systems thinker
  homepage: 'https://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Donella Meadows (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows'
    - title: 'Donella Meadows, 1941-2001, by Jim Schley (The Donella Meadows Project)'
      url: 'https://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows/'
    - title: >-
        Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (The Donella Meadows
        Project)
      url: >-
        https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Donella "Dana" Meadows was born in Elgin, Illinois, on 13 March 1941 and died of meningitis on 20 February 2001.[^1,2] She took a degree in chemistry at Carleton College and a PhD in biophysics at Harvard, then became a research fellow at MIT, on a team in the department created by [Jay Forrester](/people/jay-forrester/).[^1] She taught at Dartmouth College from 1972 for 29 years.[^1] She was a Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment in 1991 and a MacArthur Fellow in 1994.[^1]

She was on the MIT team that built World3, the global computer model behind [The Limits to Growth](/media/the-limits-to-growth/), and was the book's lead author, with Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III.[^1] Jim Schley's eulogy says the book sold nine million copies in twenty-eight languages.[^2] With Dennis Meadows she set up the Balaton Group in 1982, a network of researchers on resources, systems modelling and sustainability that meets each autumn at Lake Balaton in Hungary.[^1] She founded the Sustainability Institute, which now operates as the Academy for Systems Change.[^1]

Her 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System ranks the places where a small shift in a system can produce large changes, from parameters at the weak end to paradigms at the strong end.[^1,3] Her primer [Thinking in Systems](/media/thinking-in-systems/), on stocks, flows, feedback and leverage, was completed from her draft and published in 2008.[^1]

[Incrementalism and complexity](/articles/bogucki-incrementalism-complexity/) draws on her leverage points, and the entry on [tipping points](/terms/tipping-points/) uses the language of feedback her primer teaches.