Politics & Power Quote by Donella Meadows

A sentence this blunt is doing something more cunning than stating a fact: it’s stripping away the comforting theater of distance. “Glacier National Park” is supposed to be a vault of permanence, a place whose very name promises continuity. By saying the glaciers are “almost gone,” Meadows collapses that promise in eight words, turning a postcard icon into a deadline.

The intent isn’t lyrical grief; it’s systems thinking in street clothes. Meadows spent her career translating complex feedback loops into human-scale alarms. Here, the park works as a cultural instrument panel. If a protected, famous, federally managed landscape can’t hold onto the thing it was built to preserve, what does that imply for everywhere less protected, less visible, less loved?

The subtext is accusation without theatrics. “Almost gone” lands as moral arithmetic: we did this slowly enough to deny it, then quickly enough to make denial absurd. The phrasing also dodges the trap of abstract climate talk. No parts per million, no debate-stage qualifiers. Just absence arriving inside a proper noun Americans recognize and trust.

Context matters: Meadows was writing from the late-20th-century moment when climate science had moved from hypothesis to warning, while politics remained addicted to delay. The line functions like a pressure release for that frustration. It’s not asking you to imagine the future. It’s pointing at a map and saying the future has already been here, melting quietly under the brand name of the American outdoors.