Common Dreams has a stirring piece which was a keynote speech at the “The Festival of Faith” held in the First Presbyterian Church of Morehead City, North Carolina. In The Brightest Star in the Sky: A Tribute to Donella H. Meadows, Speaker Alan AtKisson, who knew Meadows personally, provides an invaluable overview of this seminal person of our times in the context of her recent death.

The really useful and emotionally revivifying insight comes around Meadows’s view of human relationships and feelings.

Dana believed that ultimately the world would choose maturity, compassion, and wisdom over mindless growth, consumption, and pollution. You might even say that she predicted it. Her whole life was dedicated to making that prediction, that hope, come true, and not the “conditional warning” of Beyond the Limits. She felt so strongly about the human side of the equation, in addition to the necessary economic and technological changes we must make, that the final chapter of Beyond the Limits is practically a scientific ode to the expansion of human capacity, and to the power of love itself.

“One is not allowed in the modern culture to speak about love,” she wrote, with the support of her co-authors, “except in the most romantic and trivial sense of the word. Anyone who calls upon the capacity of people to practice brotherly and sisterly love is more likely to be ridiculed than to be taken seriously. The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate about whether human beings are able to operate collectively from a basis of love. In a society that systematically develops in people their individualism, their competitiveness, and their cynicism, the pessimists are the vast majority.

“That pessimism is the single greatest problem of the current social system … and the deepest cause of unsustainability. A culture that cannot believe in, discuss, and develop the best human qualities is one that suffers from a tragic distortion of information. [...]

“… It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities. But we try, and we urge you to try. Be patient with yourself and others as you and they confront the difficulty of a changing world. Understand and empathize with inevitable resistance; there is some resistance, some clinging to the ways of unsustainability, within each of us. Include everyone in the new world. Everyone will be needed. Seek out and trust in the best human instincts in yourself and in everyone. Listen to the cynicism around you and pity those who believe it, but don’t believe it yourself.”

A must-read for anyone seriously interested in bringing about sustainability for our planet and future.