A collection of memorial tributes and biographical summaries published in the weeks following Donella Meadows's death on February 20, 2001 (see meadows-death-2001).
These tributes, gathered and published by colleagues associated with the donella-meadows-institute and the broader systems thinking community, provide first-hand accounts of Meadows's character, her intellectual contributions, and her influence as a teacher and mentor.
Contributors included colleagues from dartmouth-college, members of the balaton-group, collaborators at the sustainability-institute, and former students who had gone on to apply systems thinking in fields ranging from ecology to urban planning. Together the tributes offer a rounded picture of Meadows in her multiple roles: modeler, writer, farmer, teacher, networker, and visionary.
The tributes reflect on the full arc of her career: from the mit-and-limits-to-growth-1970-1972 era when she helped build World3 alongside dennis-meadows, jorgen-randers, and william-behrens-iii at the mit-system-dynamics-group, through decades of teaching at dartmouth-college and writing the global-citizen-columns, to her leverage-points-paper-1999 and the unfinished manuscript that would become thinking-in-systems-2008.
The memorial documents express the collective shock at a life cut short — Meadows had been widely understood to be entering a new phase of influence — and the determination of her colleagues to complete and carry forward her work. diana-wright's eventual editing of thinking-in-systems-2008 fulfilled that commitment.