Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Donella H. Meadows was born in 1941 in Elgin, Illinois. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963 and completed her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard in 1968. Between 1970 and 1972, she worked as a research assistant at Harvard University’s Center for Population Studies and at MIT’s Department of Nutrition.

At MIT, she joined an international team developing a computer model for the Club of Rome, which became the foundation for The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. As lead author of this groundbreaking report, she helped launch a worldwide debate about the Earth’s capacity to sustain continuous human development and expansion. The study examined long-term global trends in population, economics, and environmental sustainability, warning that unchecked growth threatened planetary ecosystems.

From 1972 until her death in 2001, Meadows taught in the Environmental Studies program at Dartmouth College. She became the first woman to gain tenure in natural sciences at Dartmouth. While she resigned her full-time professorship in 1983 to devote more time to international activities and writing, she remained an adjunct professor, teaching courses in environmental journalism and environmental ethics until her death.

In 1982, Donella and Dennis Meadows established the Balaton Group, an international network connecting leading researchers focused on resource use, environmental conservation, systems modeling, and sustainability.