Kate Raworth on Donella Meadows

0:05Today on Great Lives, we're joined by a renegade economist. Kate Raworth is Senior Associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and co-founder of the Donut Economics Action Lab. Kate, before we come to your choice of great life, what is a renegade economist? It's somebody who believes that economics desperately needs to be rewritten so it's actually fit for the 21st century and that's what I believe. You think that modern economics has just got something big completely wrong? Yes, I think it's absolutely overly focused on growth and it massively ignores the living planet on which all depends.

0:45Is that also the aim of your donut lab? What exactly is donut economics? So donut economics is economics that starts with a vision that looks like a donut. The goal of this image is to leave no one in the hole, falling short on the essentials of life without food and water and health care. But simultaneously don't overshoot Earth's life supporting systems don't cause climate breakdown and acidify the oceans and destroy biodiversity. We need to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Is your choice also an economist? No, she was not an economist. Who is she? Tell me.

1:21She's Danella Meadows, known by all who knew her as Dana Meadows. She was the mother of systems thinking, which I believe is the most essential way of thinking that every person should learn in school and carry throughout their lives. When did you first encounter Dana? I first came across her work when somebody mentioned her book, Thinking in Systems, to me in around 2013. I'd never seen it before. I picked up this book and I actually felt real frustration. Why, as an economist trained for four years, was I not taught to think like this? Was she alive then or had she already died? She had already died.

1:56She died in 2001. So my knowledge of her work and her life never crossed paths. And I have to say, if there was one person I could have dinner with, if there's one person in the world I could meet, It would be her. I'd never heard of Thinking in Systems. I'd heard of a book called Limits to Growth. That's hers too, isn't it? So she was one of the three key people who wrote that book. It came out in 1972 and I was just one year old. Yes, Limits to Growth was written by her and her husband, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They created the first world model of the global economy and warned the world that if we keep pursuing growth, good, we are going to not only run down the carrying capacity of this planet, but we're going to destroy the very systems on which all of our lives depend.

2:44So the book got massive reception but caused so much alarm. Many, many people spend a lot of time dismissing it, deriding it, trying to undermine it. It's turned out to be terrifyingly close to the way we've gone. It's remarkably accurate to the way we've actually carried forward. And we need still, 50 years on, we need to learn the lessons from that analysis today. But even 50 years ago, did we need to be told that there must be limits to material growth? Isn't it obvious? I'm so glad you think it's obvious because our politicians aren't in the UK. Politicians on both sides of the house say what we need is growth, growth, growth.

3:24No, in the 1960s, President Kennedy was elected on the promise of 5 % growth. It was only in the 60s that Rachel Carson's book, The Silent Spring, began to show that the way we apply pesticides to grow more food actually might be destroying life itself. So it was a stark message, certainly in the Western industrial mindset. You could say indigenous communities have known for millennia that a system doesn't thrive by trying to grow forever. But in the Western mindset, the goal of growth has become so deeply entrenched and still is today. Let's get an idea of our great life's voice. Here's Dana talking about envisioning a sustainable world at the International Society for Ecological Economics.

4:07It's very interesting why we can in this culture, we can share our cynicism to total strangers. We can complain. We can talk about everything that we think will never work, but we can't share our dreams, our hopes, our visions without being labeled naive, idealist, unrealistic. I don't need to tell you because those words may be coming up now as you listen to me. I think that we're all born with a sense of what the world should be like. You ask a child to make a vision of a sustainable world, and it comes flowing forth. So this is clearly something that we have had engendered into us by two things, I think.

4:55One is the general culture, particularly the scientific objective culture. And secondly, I think, by our disappointments as we grow old. We've tried things, they haven't worked. And instead of using the disappointments to become more effective in pushing toward our vision, rather, we've let go of our vision. Your thoughts, Kate? Well, I find that so powerfully poetic. I mean, you're speaking in front of this, you know, academic audience. She's saying, why don't we speak of our dreams? Because as a systems thinker, she absolutely knows that what is the goal of the system? And that's going to drive all of its behaviour.

5:34So if we culturally cannot speak of our goals, then we literally can't create systems that even give us a chance of moving towards that. Let's bring in our expert, Dr Marta Ceroni, co-director at the Academy for Systems Change, where she oversees an archive of Dana's work. Marta, when and where was Dana, or Donella, born? What was her early life like? So Donella Meadows was born Hager. Both her grandparents were actually German. And she was born in Illinois, March 13, 1941. And there's a beautiful writing about her upbringing, my Midwestern middle class childhood. We know that her father, Don Hager, was a conservative Midwesterner.

6:25And we know that Dana Meadows had a very strong bond with her mother, Phoebe Quist. And they would go visit the woodlands and look at wildflowers. And it's immediately obvious that Dana has an interest in science. And she not only wants to admire the flowers, but she also wants to identify them by their Latin names. And then she gets into chemistry. Which she studied at university. Yes. And we know that she was very successful. She graduates magna cum laude. She said that she was living the life of everyone in the middle class around her, you know, like driving once in a while her father's car to parties.

7:13and she wasn't aware that there was a thing called lifestyle. So she said, you know, I was just living the life as everyone else around me, eating peanut butter and Jell-O. And she makes a lot of remarks about food in particular. When did she meet Dennis? What effect did that relationship have on her life? So Data met Dennis in college. They were both chemistry students. we know from her diaries that it was a very strong fulfilling relationship where they had a lot of interests in common a love for nature for adventure they stayed collaborators through life even when they separated later on in 1969 the summer of that year Dana was already done with her PhD at Harvard and so they sell all that they had they already got married they got married in 1964.

8:10And they sell all that they have. That was a baby piano in particular. And they start traveling across Turkey and then Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka. She saw injustices and poverty. At the same time, she saw joy and traditions and she experienced being welcomed in people's homes. And at that point, Dennis has already steeped himself into systems work, has already worked with Jay Forrester. So there is narration of systems dynamics each time that they encounter issues. They are trying to interpret what they see through the lens of systems. I love the adventurousness. Yes. But it really makes sense to me that, you know, She grew up learning the names of flowers just around her home in rural America.

9:06But it was surely this trip that took her across the world and gave her literally a world view. And I know they met families and made very good friends on those travels and came to care about people in utterly different circumstances. They came back to Harvard just when quantitative analysis and the use of computers was beginning to hit the academic world. It was at this time that she and her collaborators started working on the limits to growth. Indeed. She rejected a postdoc at Harvard and changed entirely her direction of work. And that's one of the things that fascinates me, that she was actually dealing with the molecular structure of enzymes until a few months earlier.

9:54And then she's able to actually steeper herself into the nitty gritty of the world model and then to really zoom out and look at the dynamics that the world model is producing. She joined the team at MIT, sort of on the coattails originally of her husband. Was she seen as a wag, you know, wives and girlfriends by the team? Did she have to struggle to establish herself as an individual? I think this is such a familiar story to so many women of that era, following their husbands to their universities in the beginning. Ellen Ostrom, who was the first woman to get a Nobel Prize in economics, she followed her husband and began as a sort of clerk.

10:39Look, Dana Meadows joined that team because she clearly had a brilliant mind and she so did not want to be seen to be getting it through nepotism that she said, don't pay me. I will join this team. And she ended up being the lead author on the report. She was deeply respected, but when you look at photographs, she's the only woman standing in that group. The book The Limits to Growth sold over 12 million copies in 37 languages. It was her husband Dennis who was front and centre of the publicity campaign following the report in 1972. Will we move into some stable balance with our environment or are we likely to overshoot important limits and collapse?

11:21When global population is doubling every 33 years, when resource consumption is doubling every 20 years, no long-term view of mankind can proceed without first forming some preliminary answers to these questions. We appear to have a viable alternative. one in which population and material production could be brought into balance with the finite environment and with our resources. Every year we delay makes an orderly transition to this stable situation much more difficult, and it decreases our ultimate options. How is this received, Kate, in the academic world? Well, I find it so hard to listen to that.

12:01You know, this is in 1972. I'm now a 52-year-old woman. I was a toddler and they knew this. They'd done the analysis. And the analysis was so confronting to industry, politics, economics, and financial markets that had been created that it got roundly trashed. And mainstream economics tried to find every way they could to dismiss it and really worked hard to make us not listen to Dennis Meadows. and you play that now, we have overshot planetary boundaries. We have continued on the path that already half a century ago they'd said we must steer away from this. Well, we just did right at it. And here we are having to deal with the aftermath of what we failed to learn back then.

12:51Let me put a devil's advocate point of view. It was, I think, around this time that Norman Borlaug was discovering a way to grow about five times as much wheat per hectare as we had been able to before. What would Dana, and what do you think of the contribution that people like him made to vast increases in productivity? So it's a great example that through what was known as the Green Revolution of hybrid seeds and application of pesticides and fertilisers, intense use of chemicals, you could indeed, in the relatively short term, massively increase the crop. A systems thinker would say, well done for the short term, take care of the long term.

13:39What are going to be the consequences of all that application of fertilizer, all that application of pesticides? I think, I believe Borlaug said to them, I've given you some time. We still need to, right? We still need, but this is the way our societies tend to fail to learn. When we get a temporary solution, we don't redouble the effort to solve this. We lean into it and ride with it until another crisis emerges. In early 2001, Dana spoke to Alice Friedman. She said, we were at MIT. We had been trained in science. The way we thought about the future was utterly logical. If you tell people there's a disaster ahead, they will change course.

14:19If you give them a choice between a good future and a bad one, they will pick the good. They might even be grateful. Naive, weren't we? She concluded. Well, it's the route so many scientists go. We've done the analysis. We've got shocking, extraordinary results. Let's present them to the world and then expecting the world to respond. So if it's naive, it's been done many, many, many times. what Dana then did though was start thinking okay what are the many different ways of intervening systems and she she became famous for talking about the different leverage points in which you can intervene one of the highest leverage points is to intervene at the level of the paradigm help people change the paradigm by which we see and she said you know this in an individual this doesn't take time it can happen in a millisecond the scales fall from our eyes we can literally see anew.

15:15And that's why she was writing. The book was never published while she was alive. It was put together posthumously by her friends and colleagues. But she was writing towards the book, wanting to share this worldview to get it ingrained in a younger generation. So what in practical terms, Marta, did she and Dennis do next? Well, it's interesting because once you see what's ahead, what kind of choices do you make for your life. And so Dennis and Dana moved to New Hampshire to a rural area where they could start living in a way that really was within the limits and kind of considering themselves as a microcosm and an experiment.

15:56And she made a decision not to have children. So it really affected also how she oriented to life. And they both got an appointment at Dartmouth College. Dana was one of the early female faculty. She was at the Environmental Studies Department and she was beloved and her classes took off and from 20 students she ended up with 80 students and beyond. We have a snippet of Dana teaching in the spring of 1977 using the example of the collapse of the kaibab deer population. You don't need to understand all of this today I'll tell you what a few of these equations mean 50, equation 50 is a level equation for the deer population DP what it says is that deer population at time K which is now, is what the deer population was a minute ago at time J, plus the amount of time that's elapsed between a minute ago and now, times the number of deer that have been born minus the number of deer that have been eaten That's all it says.

17:02Pretty simple. Pretty simple, she says. Kate, what's she trying to say there? OK, but that's about the most nerdy I've ever heard her being, right? She was actually the one who made it accessible to everybody. What she's trying to show is that systems have dynamics. There are two major dynamics. There's reinforcing feedback. The more you have, the more you get. And that will happen with deer, right? The more deer you have, the more deer will be born, as long as there's enough food. and the deer population will rise. But then there's also a balancing feedback. Let's say the more deer there are, the more will get eaten by the mountain lions and the bobcats.

17:39And so that will keep the population in check. Now, what happened with the kaibab deer was President Roosevelt in around 1905 or 1906, he said, we want the deer population to increase. This is a beautiful animal. There's only 4 ,000 of them. So without being good system sinkers, they intervened in this system and said, well, take away all the predators. They went in and they killed the coyotes, the mountain lions, the bobcats, the bulls. This is good for the deer, right? So now the deer, you've taken away the balancing feedback of the predator. All you've got is the reinforcing deer, have more deer, have more deer.

18:12And the deer population rocketed up. Destroyed the trees. They destroyed the trees. They ate everything. They destroyed the food system on which they depended. And it collapsed. And thousands of them starved to death. because humanity had come in unknowingly, unthinkingly, not as systems thinkers in a very simplistic mindset and taken away a key part of the system that kept it thriving in balance. So that's what system thinking teaches us not to do. And by the way, it's not just about deers and bobcats. It's about the financial system. You know, after the global financial crash, Gordon Brown and Ben Bernanke, heads of the banks, they said, we realized what we did wrong.

18:54We only looked at individual banks. We never looked at the risk in the relationships between the banks. Being a systems thinker, that's what it teaches you to do. Look at the relationships between things and see how they're interrelated. And you will never so boldly go in and just remove a piece of it thinking everything will be fine. You're so clear, Kate, that even I can understand you. I believe that you have taught children, or at least your children, systems thinking. Absolutely. So in my book done at Economics, there's seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. And one of those seven ways is get savvy with systems, be a systems thinker.

19:30And once I was making this point in a debate with an economics professor and he went very red in the face and he said, systems thinking is far too complex for undergraduates. And I thought, no, it really is not. So come lockdown, come homeschooling. I have my 11 year old twins at home. I have to teach them something. Well, I knew exactly what I was going to teach them the very first lesson. I pulled out a big whiteboard and I said, let's think about COVID. I drew two loops. I drew a reinforcing loop. The more people are infected, the more infections there will be. And I drew a balancing loop. The more people who are infected, the more they stay at home.

20:03So the few infections there might be. I handed over the pens and I gave it to my kids. They drew the most fabulous, all sorts of feedback loops. More people will be playing the guitar in their back gardens. More nurses will be overworked. More pressure on the government. More people will be crossed with Boris Johnson. They drew this wonderful complex world. And my daughter, she jumped up and down. She said, now at last I can express what I see in the world. And I thought, that's the power of systems thinking. I wish my mother had taught me like that. Dana continued for the rest of her life to teach courses at Dartmouth, where she became a mentor for many students there.

20:42My producer spoke to one of them, Dr Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute. She was such a pivotal person for me to meet. I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for my PhD in neurogenetics. So those were really male-dominated fields. And it was a hard field to be in at that time. So me in my late 20s, meeting someone who really had a different stance in the world, like really deep and rigorous mathematics of system dynamics, computer simulation, and in the same breath, in the same lecture to talk about love, was a model for me that I've tried now to embody, to not let go of that rigor, which I was trained really well in and value, but to be open and vulnerable and to not be afraid to be a very strong proponent of a vision of a better world.

21:41A slightly spiky question here, Kate. It strikes me that she consolidated her influence partly by attracting a set of supporters who were all of the same mindset about the environmental future. I wouldn't call it a cult, but to a degree, one was either in it or out of it. Did she polarise? Oh, I don't think she polarised at all. I think she spoke her mind. But why should a woman not speak her mind when she sees the whole system of which the dominant economists and financiers and politicians and industries are focusing on just a mere part in order to maximise financial returns and maximise political power?

22:22She spoke. That's not polarising. That's conviction. conviction she was a woman before her time at the cutting edge of economics today guess what it's complex economics they're coming around it's really recognizing we need to think in systems these ideas are resurgent so I don't see her as a polarizing figure at all she yes she dared to speak her mind she said growth is the stupidest purpose ever invented by any culture we've got to have enough. Now, if you think that's polarising, then yes. If you think that's wise advice to a world that's got drawn into a cult of growth, it's wisdom that dares speak back to a system that's taking us off the rails.

23:05She was not afraid to talk about love, about visions, but I wonder whether it caused crusty old scientists to take her less seriously than she might otherwise have been taken. That may well be true. All the worse for the crusty old scientists. I mean, should we not bring our whole selves? Should we not bring our vision of a world that could be? I find it profoundly motivating. And the young people who are in university today, they grew up striking for climate when they were teenagers. And now they're at university and they want to learn ideas that equip them for this century that they see. And more than any other book that they turn up with, it's thinking in systems, that they've thumbed and written in the margins because it becomes like a Bible for some young people.

23:53This is the way through which I want to see the world and this is the way through which I want to transform the world. From 1986 on, she wrote a column called The Global Citizen. What sort of things did that cover, Marta? Yeah, these columns are never complex or nerdy. They very rarely actually mention even the word systems, but they're hooked to events in the news. And so she would touch on politics, on environmental issues, on social issues, very entertaining type of writing. And when I mentioned Danella Meadows, a lot of people who even have not met her, but have read their columns, they put their hand to the heart because of how they were touched by that voice.

24:38It was for 13 years, every week on Sunday, this column would come out and would be syndicated through 20 other newspapers. Did she get anything wrong? Any sort of bad directions? Yeah, it's easy to put Dana on a pedestal, isn't it? I mean, talking to her friends, it seemed that towards the end of her life, she had become very monastic, if you will, very dedicated. and so maybe one advice I would give her is to slow down. She was envisioning a longer life, obviously, and for herself she was envisioning a time when she would become a grandma, like metaphorically a grandma, of the children in her intentional community.

25:28Slowing down, playing, spending more time in the garden, for sure, and continue to write. That was essential for her. Dana died in 2001 at just 59. You said at the start, Kate, that you'd have loved to meet her. What do you think she would have thought of your donut vision and its popularity? I'm told by friends who did know her that she would have supported it because she talked about how do we change paradigms? We come with a positive new vision of what we're for. Stand in that space and you speak confidently and clearly from that space. You don't waste time with reactionaries. You speak to the vast middle ground of people who are open to listening to new ideas.

26:11I'd already drawn the donut diagram and it was the following year that someone put me onto her work. And when I read her book about how to change systems, I had that experience. Oh, that's what I've been doing. She's giving me a language and a framework to explain what I've intuitively been doing. I believe she would be at my back. That was exactly the question I was going to ask. Say she was in the room with us now. It's 50 years since limits to growth. Lots of things have changed. And there is some public understanding of what she was trying to say. What advice would she be giving us now, do you think?

26:49Well, I hope she would be saying, look, of course, systems thinking should be taught throughout schools because kids understand it. I believe she would be helping us interpret the interconnection of things. She would be speaking to the whole. Can I read this beautiful quote? She talked about being a great systems thinker, not in terms of equations and the methods, but in terms of your attitude. She says it will not be possible in this integrated world. for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail or for your company to succeed if your workers fail or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor fail or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.

27:36She took us to the view of the whole and, wow, we need that insight and vision more now than ever. My thanks to Marta Cironi and to Kate Raworth for nominating the smart, hopeful, loving Donella Meadows. Goodbye.