The bioregional vision of Donella (Dana) Meadows has been a guiding one for the Bioregional Learning Centre in South Devon. To mark our five-year anniversary we are publishing it here for the first time, with permission from the Academy for Systems Change that continues the work of the Donella Meadows Institute. As well as expressing gratitude to Dana, I want to thank Isak Stoddard at Uppsala University (and a member of the Balaton Group) for sharing this with me around eight years ago when I was first exploring the potential of a bioregion to be a place-sourced organising principle for multi-systems change. It has become our blueprint: we refer to it to keep us on track time and again.

Dana Meadows wrote the paper that this extract is taken from some time shortly after 1982. Titled History of the Ideas Underlying the Balaton Group, it opens by reporting on a conversation between Vernon Ruttan, John Todd and herself that took place within a workshop Dana had convened in 1980 on approaches for ending hunger in the world. They were exploring the questions ‘How does a society develop the capacity to invent institutions and technologies that truly fit its own culture and environment? How can it filter through the inventions and impositions of the rest of the world and choose what really works in its own context? How can it learn enough about its own resources, environment, needs, and potentials? Does any society now have that capacity? What does such a capacity even look like?

Isabel Carlisle

Read full article by Isabel Carlisle in Bioregional Learning Center

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