Donella H. Meadows

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.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, 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, on stocks, flows, feedback and leverage, was completed from her draft and published in 2008.¹

Incrementalism and complexity draws on her leverage points, and the entry on tipping points uses the language of feedback her primer teaches.