Search Results for “posts” – Sciences for Girls

Donella Meadows: Rethinking the world for a sustainable future

Sciences for Girls — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:28:34 +0000

Summary

Donella Meadows, a visionary scientist and pioneer of systems thinking, left her mark on the 20th century with her work on the limits to growth and sustainable development. Discover how her ideas, still relevant today, encourage us to rethink our relationship with the world and to act for a more just and planet-friendly future.

Donella MEADOWS by the river
Source : https://sciencesforgirls.com

Donella Meadows: An inspiring scientist committed to the planet

Donella Hager Meadows, often called Dana, was born in 1941 in the United States. She is one of the most influential female scientists of the 20th century in the field of environment and systems thinking.

Systems thinking is a way of analyzing how all the elements of a system (such as society, the economy, and nature) interact with each other.

An extraordinary academic career and early commitment

Donella Meadows grew up in Illinois, USA. She studied chemistry at Carleton University and then earned a PhD in biophysics from Harvard. She quickly became interested in how human activities affect the planet. After her studies, she worked at the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), where she began exploring the links between science, society, and the environment.

“The Limits to Growth”: A scientific report that made history

In 1972, Donella Meadows and a team of researchers from MIT published a landmark report: The Limits to Growth. This project had been commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international group of scientists and economists concerned about the consequences of global growth. Using a computer model called World3, the team simulated changes in population, industrial production, pollution, and natural resource use. Their conclusion was clear: if current trends in economic and demographic growth continued unchanged, the planet would reach its ecological limits during the 21st century. Meadows and her colleagues did not advocate halting progress, but rather a shift toward sustainable development, a concept still relatively unknown at the time.

The book had a global impact. Translated into dozens of languages, it sparked both admiration and controversy. Many praised the courage of a young researcher who dared to question the dominant economic model. For Donella, this work was not a pessimistic prediction, but a call to collectively reflect on our future.

Systems thinking: “Understanding in order to act”

After publishing “The Limits to Growth,” Donella continued to explore what makes a system (whether a society, an ecosystem, or an economy) stable or vulnerable. She believed that creating a fairer and more sustainable world required first understanding the invisible relationships between the different parts of a system. In her famous essay, “Leverages for Action in a System,” published in 1999, she proposed an idea that has become essential: in every system, there are “leverages”—places where a small action can produce a big change. She explained that while changing certain numbers or rules might have a limited effect, transforming the goals of a system, or better yet, the beliefs and values upon which it is founded, can change the entire direction of a society.

This approach, both intellectual and profoundly human, showed that the true levers of change are not found solely in public policies, but in our way of thinking about the world. Meadows thus invited policymakers, researchers, and citizens to “see the whole,” to think in terms of relationships rather than isolated objects.

Leverage points for effective change
Source: https://www.ux-republic.com/

Leverage Points
Source : https://img.paragraph.com

Teaching, writing, and legacy

Beyond her research, Donella Meadows devoted a large part of her life to teaching. For nearly thirty years, she trained generations of students at Dartmouth University. Her lectures were renowned for their clarity and warmth: she did not simply impart knowledge, she encouraged her students to think critically and to connect science to everyday life.

In parallel, she developed a career as a writer and communicator. Her weekly column, The Global Citizen, appeared in numerous newspapers and translated global issues into simple, accessible language. She addressed topics as varied as climate change, social justice, international cooperation, and the role of compassion in political decision-making.
In 1996, she founded the Sustainability Institute (now the Donella Meadows Institute), a center dedicated to research and the promotion of sustainable living. This institution has become a meeting place for scientists, policymakers, and citizens, true to her vision of a world based on collaboration and mutual understanding.

His work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1994, awarded to the most creative thinkers whose ideas transform society.

Portrait de Donella MEADOWS
Source : https://www.elsaltodiario.com

An extraordinary scientist

Trained in chemistry and biophysics, she mastered the most demanding fundamentals of science while maintaining a curious and open-minded perspective on the world. But Donella was not content with simply observing. For her, science, politics, economics, and ethics formed an inseparable whole, a vast system that had to be understood in its entirety.

She also possessed the rare gift of making science vibrant and accessible to all, without ever oversimplifying it. Through her writings, lectures, and teaching, she fostered curiosity and a sense of responsibility. In a scientific world still largely dominated by men, she distinguished herself through her intelligence, clarity, and kindness, paving the way for many women after her. More than a researcher, Donella Meadows was a committed voice, driven by the conviction that science should above all serve life.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows

https://donellameadows.org/donella-meadows-legacy/donella-dana-meadows/

https://systemsthinkingalliance.org/donella-meadows-pioneering-contributions-to-systems-thinking-and-environmental-advocacy/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthieu-dardaillon_o%C3%B9-agir-pour-transformer-un-syst%C3%A8me-avec-activity-7056968858250682370-q6OM/?originalSubdomain=fr

https://www.balatongroup.org/fellowship/

https://donellameadows.org/

L’article Donella Meadows: Rethinking the world for a sustainable future est apparu en premier sur Sciences for Girls.

Pride is the Name of Resistance: The Stories of Florence NIGHTINGALE and Sara Josephine BAKER

Sciences for Girls — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 06:23:35 +0000

June is LGBTQIAPN+ Pride Month. But what exactly is this pride? Is it simply a festive invitation to celebrate? No. The pride we’re talking about here is a political gesture, a living memory, a denunciation, and a presence. It’s a way of saying: we are here, we have always been here .

This month is not just about coloring the urban landscape with vibrant flags. It is also about illuminating the dark areas where violence lurks. A multifaceted violence: symbolic, physical, political, economic, and perhaps the most insidious of all—epistemic. Because when we deny someone the right to know and to produce knowledge, we deprive them not only of their voice, but also of their full and complete existence. And this is undoubtedly one of the cruelest forms of exclusion.

LGBTQIAPN+ people and organizations construct culture, science, art, and thought. But the question is: does science recognize them as legitimate producers of knowledge? Some schools of thought insist that scientific knowledge must be objective , neutral, and devoid of subjectivity. According to this perspective, there should be no room for personal affections, desires, or experiences in the production of knowledge—as if science could emerge independently of human, social, and historical contexts.

Yet they forget that science is a human creation—and therefore a cultural one. There is no science without humanity. And if this is the case, we must ask ourselves: who are, historically, the humans who have been recognized as having the right to produce valid knowledge? Who occupies this position of authorized knowledge?

It is essential to remember that the production of knowledge should not be reserved for a single category of people: all intelligences, all experiences, regardless of gender, social origin, or emotional orientation, are necessary to enrich science and knowledge. This is where the power of Donna Haraway’s (1944) thought comes into play in her article ” Situated Knowledge: The Question of Science for Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective ” (1988). She reminds us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge, no universal knowledge: all knowledge is situated. In other words, it is born from specific bodies, experiences, histories, and social positions. Knowledge is an embodied verb. And whoever produces knowledge matters. Immensely.

Coming out as LGBTQIAPN+ often means choosing to live with the possibility of erasure. Not only socially, but also epistemicly. It means having to keep one’s epistemologies in the closet. The thinker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) brilliantly described this structure in her famous essay The Epistemology of the Closet (1993): the closet is not just a hiding place; it is a regime of power, a filter that determines what can be said, known, acknowledged. Entire bodies of knowledge are locked away there, kept in an enforced silence.

Rediscovering the trajectories of LGBTQIAPN+ people who have contributed to science is therefore not just an act of remembrance: it is an act of justice. Shining a light on these figures means breaking the structured pact of ignorance that seeks to make them invisible. It also means broadening our understanding of what science is—and can be.

Let us take the example of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) and Sara Josephine Baker (1873-1945), two women whose lives, even without explicit proclamation of their sexual orientation, are part of queer and feminist logics of knowledge.

Florence Nightingale has gone down in history not only as the founder of modern nursing, but also as a woman incredibly ahead of her time in many areas: public health, statistics, epidemiology, hospital management, and even health education. During the Crimean War, she observed that the majority of soldiers did not die from their wounds, but from diseases like typhus, cholera, and dysentery, all of which were preventable with better hygiene. To prove this, she used statistics in a very rigorous way (which was rare at the time) and invented super-visual graphs, like the famous “polar sector diagram ” (the “coxcomb chart”), to get her message across to the government and public opinion. Thanks to this, she managed to influence the British Parliament and push for important reforms in military hospitals.

But she didn’t stop there. In India, she mapped mortality rates in different regions and showed that the lack of sanitation, clean water, and waste collection had a direct impact on people’s health, particularly on infant mortality. She proposed very concrete solutions, such as building sewer systems or installing health posts. In terms of hospital architecture, she completely redesigned hospitals, imagining well-ventilated, bright wards, organized by type of illness: an idea that served as a model for a long time, as in the Royal Herbert Hospital.

In 1860, she also founded her own nursing school at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she established a serious training program that combined theory, clinical observation, and scientific rigor. She wanted nurses to be recognized as true professionals, trained and competent. In her book ” Notes on Nursing , “ she gives plenty of very modern advice: let daylight into the patient’s room, avoid noise, be attentive to the slightest signs (such as a change in complexion or behavior), change the sheets regularly, and insist on hygiene—things that seem obvious today, but were not in her time.

She also interacted with experts, such as statistician William Farr, with whom she discussed methods for collecting and analyzing health data. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 200 reports and publications, always based on facts, observations, and data. Her approach, highly scientific but also deeply human, helped transform public health and nursing, showing that science could (and should) be used to concretely improve people’s lives.

More than a nurse, she was a true health scientist. She never married, rejected the social role imposed on women of her time, and devoted her life to her profession as a way of desiring differently. In a functional closet, she produced knowledge with profoundly transformative power.

Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician who truly changed the way children’s health was addressed in the early 20th century. She worked primarily in New York City, where many children from poor families and immigrants were dying from preventable diseases. To combat this, she established a system of regular child health monitoring, with home visits by nurses who explained to mothers how to properly care for babies, particularly regarding hygiene and breastfeeding.

Thanks to this, illnesses like diarrhea and infections were greatly reduced. She also created centers where families could obtain safe milk, heated to kill dangerous bacteria, which prevented many poisonings. Another of her great ideas was to impose vaccination cards for children in schools, which helped stop epidemics like smallpox or diphtheria. Scientifically, she analyzed data on diseases and mortality to understand where and how best to intervene. She is also known for having worked on the case of “Typhoid Mary,” a woman who transmitted typhoid fever without being sick herself, and Baker helped limit the spread of the disease thanks to epidemiological techniques that were very advanced for the time.

On top of all that, she was one of the first to champion the idea of family planning and science-based sex education, which was not at all common in her time. Sara Josephine Baker showed that science and medicine could truly change people’s lives, especially the poorest, by improving public health and making healthcare accessible to all. Baker shared her life with Louise Pearce, a relationship we can now understand as a lesbian emotional and intellectual partnership. Her work, while remarkable, was only possible because her sexuality remained in a gray area between known and unsaid. Publicly ignored, but privately tolerated.

Both challenged the dominant model of science, demonstrating that knowledge is not born solely in laboratories, but also in the field of life. Nightingale did science with numbers and compassion. Baker, with listening and action. They embedded their knowledge in concrete contexts, touching reality with sensitivity and rigor. Donna Haraway teaches us that objectivity is not about eliminating the subject, but about recognizing their position. And that is precisely what these women did: producing knowledge from their margins, from their dissident bodies, from their singular experiences. They expanded the boundaries of what we consider “scientific.”

Reading their stories through the lens of Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet and Haraway’s situated knowledges is not just a theoretical exercise. It is a political act. It is to affirm that LGBTQIAPN+ pride is also a matter of intellect, method, critique, and science. It is to reject the idea that legitimate knowledge exists only within norm-conforming structures.

Let us remember—and keep reminding ourselves—that knowledge is also an act of love. And that each time a dissident body dares to think about the world, it also reinvents the possibility of existing in it.

Written by Daniel Manzoni de Almeida and edited by Intan

L’article Pride is the Name of Resistance: The Stories of Florence NIGHTINGALE and Sara Josephine BAKER est apparu en premier sur Sciences for Girls.

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Sciences for Girls — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:40:21 +0000

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A Word from the Team...

What’s your Passion?

For us at SciGi, it’s “Science”!

SciGi exists to inspire scientific vocations among young girls who, like we did at the time, doubt their abilities or for whom scientific careers are limited only to “Medicine”.

To do this, we highlight women scientists who have inspiring careers and women who have made their mark in the history of science.

Search Results for “posts” – Sciences for Girls

Donella Meadows: Rethinking the world for a sustainable future

Summary

Donella Meadows, Systems thinking, Limits to growth, Sustainable development, Leverage points, Club of Rome, Sustainability Institute, Climate change, Social justice, Environmental education

Donella Meadows: An inspiring scientist committed to the planet

Donella Meadows, Pensée systémique, Limites à la croissance, Développement durable, Points de levier, Club de Rome, Sustainability Institute, Changement climatique, Justice sociale, Éducation environnementale

An extraordinary academic career and early commitment

“The Limits to Growth”: A scientific report that made history

Systems thinking: “Understanding in order to act”

Donella Meadows, Pensée systémique, Limites à la croissance, Développement durable, Points de levier, Club de Rome, Sustainability Institute, Changement climatique, Justice sociale, Éducation environnementale

Teaching, writing, and legacy

Donella Meadows, Pensée systémique, Limites à la croissance, Développement durable, Points de levier, Club de Rome, Sustainability Institute, Changement climatique, Justice sociale, Éducation environnementale

An extraordinary scientist

Donella Meadows, Pensée systémique, Limites à la croissance, Développement durable, Points de levier, Club de Rome, Sustainability Institute, Changement climatique, Justice sociale, Éducation environnementale

Sources

Pride is the Name of Resistance: The Stories of Florence NIGHTINGALE and Sara Josephine BAKER

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A Word from the Team...

What’s your Passion?

SciGi Calendar

Education, Interview

Interview, Medicine

Energy, Environnement, Interview

Agroecology, Interview

Asrochemistry, Interview, Research

Exobiology, Research

Heroes, Medicine

Heroes, Radioactivity

Heroes, Medical imaging

Heroes, Medical imaging

Climate, Environment, Heroes

Heroes, Sports Medicine

Heroes, Medicine

Heroes, Radioactivity

Heroes, Medical imaging

Heroes, Medical imaging

Climate, Environment, Heroes

Heroes, Sports Medicine

History Through Melodies

Childhood and Education

Excavations in Crete

Harriet Boyd Hawes on the Front Line

The Legacy of Harriet Boyd Hawes

Sources

Childhood and Education

Career in Cybersecurity

“The image of the ‘geek’ in a hoodie is so attached to cybersecurity that it deters vocations” – Nacira Guerroudji-Salvan

Contribution to Society

Distinctions

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