A chapter in Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, edited by Robert Costanza, Olman Segura, and Juan Martinez-Alier, published by Island Press in 1996. The essay was originally presented in 1994 at a conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics and represents one of Meadows's most direct statements about the relationship between vision and analysis in sustainability work.
Central Argument
The essay argues that vision must precede — and cannot be replaced by — analysis. The standard move in sustainability work is to identify problems, model systems, and propose technically optimal solutions. Meadows inverts this: without a shared, explicit vision of what a sustainable world would look, feel, and function like, analysis has no target and optimization has no direction.
This is not mysticism but epistemology. In systems terms: leverage-points can only be identified relative to a goal. If the goal is unarticulated or assumed, interventions may optimize for proxy measures rather than genuine sustainability. sustainability-indicators — which Meadows developed in indicators-of-sustainability-1998 — require a prior vision of what sustainability means in order to measure whether you are approaching or receding from it.
The Vision Exercise
The essay includes Meadows's practice of asking audiences to describe a sustainable world in positive terms — not the absence of pollution, not the cessation of growth, but what would be present. Most people find this surprisingly difficult. The exercise reveals that much sustainability discourse is organized around negation (stopping bad things) rather than affirmation (building good ones).
Meadows argues this is a structural problem: bounded-rationality-in-systems means we tend to react to problems in our immediate field rather than act toward distant aspirations. Correcting this requires deliberate cultivation of what she calls "visioning" — a practiced capacity to hold positive futures in mind while navigating present constraints.
Connections
The argument connects to Meadows's work on leverage-points — specifically the insight that goals of a system are among the highest-leverage intervention points. Changing goals (including the implicit goal of perpetual growth) changes what reinforcing-feedback-loops amplify and what balancing-feedback-loops hold stable.
The essay also anticipates themes in dancing-with-systems and thinking-in-systems-2008, where Meadows emphasizes that systems thinkers need both analytical rigor and the capacity to hold alternative visions. The balaton-group, which Meadows helped found and lead, embodied this combination — annual meetings mixed technical analysis with explicit visioning exercises.