A monthly personal newsletter distributed by Donella Meadows to friends, colleagues, and students, running approximately from 1985 until her death in meadows-death-2001. Where the global-citizen-columns addressed a general newspaper readership through syndication, the Dear Folks letters were intimate communications to a known community — colleagues from the balaton-group, former students from dartmouth-college, friends from the farm in Plainfield, Vermont.
The letters are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0, permitting noncommercial distribution with attribution and no derivatives.
Character and Tone
The letters are more personal than any of Meadows's published work. They report on the farm — planting, harvests, weather, the behavior of animals — alongside reflections on teaching, travel to balaton-group meetings in Hungary, encounters with colleagues, and the progress of current research.
Systems thinking appears in the letters, but less as explicit analysis and more as a way of noticing: observations about feedback-loops in farm ecology, about self-organization in communities, about the relationship between local action and larger systems. The analytical apparatus is present but worn lightly.
Relationship to Other Work
The Dear Folks letters occupy a distinctive place in Meadows's body of work:
Some themes from the letters appear in refined form in dancing-with-systems and thinking-in-systems-2008 — the love of systems, the humor, the acceptance that complexity resists control. The letters show the workshop where those ideas were developed in conversation with people Meadows trusted.
Archival Significance
The Dear Folks correspondence represents a primary source for understanding Meadows's intellectual development and personal life in the period between groping-in-the-dark-1982 and thinking-in-systems-2008. The donella-meadows-institute has made the letters available as part of its archival mission to preserve and disseminate her work.