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]
Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be - we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.
The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone - terribly alone in a world without God and without (hu)man(ity).
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