No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Interpretation
Values like justice and freedom cannot be quantified, but they require advocacy to exist.
In this quote, Donella Meadows emphasizes the subjective nature of fundamental values such as justice, democracy, and freedom. She argues that without active discussion and the establishment of systems that promote these values, they risk fading from existence, highlighting the importance of collective advocacy and vigilance in upholding societal principles.
In practice
During a speech about civil rights, this quote can inspire action towards justice.
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
Speak the truth._x000D_ Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,_x000D_ and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power._x000D_ Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence._x000D_ All growth is not good._x000D_ The environment is a necessity, not a luxury._x000D_ There is such a thing as enough.
Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]
Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.
God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise
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