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Dennis Meadows stands in a circle of educators, most of whom he's never met before, digging through a canvas bag full of toys. He pulls out a few fluffy yellow balls and quietly explains the rules of the game: he will throw the balls to one person, they throw it to someone else, who passes it on to another, always in the same order. Sounds simple.

He throws the first ball out slowly, then another and another. No problem. He then picks up the pace of his tosses. As the balls fly around the circle, he grabs a few more toys, larger and smaller balls of varying textures, which he flings out with ever increasing speed. Balls bounce off bodies and drop to the floor, with people lunging in and out of the circle after them, when out fly--at breakneck speed--a couple rubber chickens. The circle quickly collapses into chaos.

Before the group grasps the deeper meaning of this exercise, Meadows instructs everyone in the room to find a thumb-wrestling partner. The object of this game is to achieve the highest possible number of pins. Faces contort into grimaces and grunts rise up around the room as these refined, well-educated people struggle to overpower their colleagues with their thumbs. It's a strange and amusing spectacle.

When the staff of the Concord Consortium, an educational research and development group based in Concord, Mass., invited Meadows down from the University of New Hampshire to speak to them, they probably expected a straightforward lecture on sustainable development. The group is in the first phase of a five-year project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, to create a curriculum which teaches public-school children about the concepts of sustainability--the need to live within the earth's limits. But Meadows, co-author of two of the best known books on the subject and a international leader in the field of sustainable education, played games instead.

With the circle game, he showed the behavior of a group, or system, that has exceeded its limits. In the game, the limit is the group's ability to catch fast-flying objects; in the real world, the limit is dwindling natural resources. Thumb wrestling, on the other hand, reveals the competitive and sometimes embarrassingly irrational nature of human behavior. Teams in which members cooperated, taking turns to allow each other to score points, would have emerged as winning teams rather than as individual losers.

On his home turf, Meadows's formal title is director of UNH's Institute for Policy and Social Science Research. After a few calls around campus, I find out that unofficially, he is a free-ranging sage, a problem solver, a mentor, a strategic thinker, and a visionary. He inspires awe, he raises hackles, he overpowers with intellect and seems to magically transform ideas into productive organizations. Over the course of ten years, he has created a diverse institute that, for example, teaches corporations to work as teams, enlightens state policymakers, and helps children publish their own books. Though he has no formal teaching or research responsibilities, he does both passionately--on campus and around the world--days, nights and weekends. The age-old question arises: who is this guy?

I have a chance to find out when Meadows invites me to tag along as he gives Elizabeth McLane Bradley, a former University trustee from Hanover whom Meadows has known since his Dartmouth days in the 1970-'80s, a grand tour of his growing institute. We stop in at the Huddleston Hall offices of New Futures, the latest addition to the institute, where Meadows, an oddly practical visionary, tells us the venture will tackle the state's enormous substance abuse problem, and in the same breath, boasts that he picked up the furniture at bargain-basement prices from a going-out-of-business sale. Then we're off to Thompson Hall, where Meadows has taken over the entire basement, a space once plagued by poisonous air which several other campus groups have long since abandoned. He helped to procure funding to transform the place into a safe and hospitable place, which this fall will become the new home of the institute and one of its many divisions, the UNH Survey Center.

Next we hop into Meadows's Volvo station wagon for a white-knuckle drive out to the Browne Center for Experiential Learning, located on 100 acres on Durham Point. Meadows is so deep into describing the innovative work of the center that he fails to notice he has pulled out in front of a car on Main Street, causing the driver to swerve into the other lane and lay furiously on his horn. But no matter. Ms. MacLane Bradley, a dignified and gracious visitor, is engrossed in the conversation, while I, in the back seat, wonder about the truth of Volvo's advertising claims.

We arrive safely at the Browne Center, which Meadows describes as a "good example of the way (he) works." Before Meadows's involvement, the center was but one lone building in the woods dedicated to outdoor education, without its own operating budget or staff. Intrigued by its potential as a center for experiential learning, Meadows mustered the resources to hire a director and staff, procure more land, expand the programs and add new buildings. In a few years he, along with kinesiology professor Mike Gass and Pam McPhee, director of the Browne Center, to realize the vision of former UNH physical education professor Evelyn Browne, who once lived on this land and donated it the University. Today the center is fully self-sustaining and teaches some 8,000 people a year, from corporate groups to schoolteachers and the UNH community, how to build productive teams.

Shouts and laughter in the distance draw our attention to a large wall of wood, where a small group, some at the bottom and some at the top of the wall, arms outstretched, is energetically hoisting a rather large man up and over. Meadows tells us that experiences such as these can create lasting bonds between people. "No one can do it alone; they have to access their collective knowledge. The emphasis is not on one person being a Tarzan, but in coming up with strategies that enable to whole group to succeed." He then leads us down a path through the woods, walking briskly, always a few steps ahead of us, his prominent head slightly bowed and thrust out beyond his large feet. With his long, fly-away silver hair, Birkenstocks and socks, and tightly wound intensity, he looks the part of the harried academic. He turns back to let us catch up, then moves on again, talking and gesturing, unconsciously lurching far beyond us again.

We arrive at a small yurt, which Meadows and some colleagues constructed under the direction of a yurt master during a 12-day retreat in the summer of 1997. As he shows his old friend the round, wooden structure, he is as excited as a small boy leading his mother to a tower he has just built. It is another tribute to Evelyn Browne, fellow builder of yurts, yet, as with most of what Meadows does, it serves an important function. "This is a good place to come for a debriefing when you're done with an intense program," he tells us. "The shape of the structure is conducive to focusing the energy inward. The key, of course, is to reflect on how you're going to bring what you've learned into your life and work."

The Browne Center is not the only incarnation of the Meadows magic. On university campuses, with their labyrinths of political hierarchies and mind-numbingly slow administrative processes, it can be a challenge to get things done. The challenge is even greater at UNH, where good ideas and intentions can be snuffed out with a single blow of the budget ax. Yet Meadows is a master at finessing the system, at forging fruitful alliances and of obtaining large sums of grant money that can propel his agenda forward at--academically speaking--light speed. If he believes in an idea, he will likely put his power behind it.

A good example is the experience of Durham resident and creative dance teacher Beth Olshansky, who several years ago was worried about her children, who were lagging behind in their reading and writing skills. She began to experiment with her own and the neighborhood children, trying to find fun, creative ways to strengthen their skills. She discovered that when she integrated movement techniques and visual arts into her teaching, the children made rapid progress.

Meadows heard about Olshansky's work and approached her about the possibility of enlarging its scope. The first step, he told her, was to gather empirical evidence to see whether her methods actually worked. "I was very skeptical. I thought, how can you research a creative endeavor?," she says.

Meadows donated time and money from the institute to test Olshansky's methods in the public schools. The U.S. Department of Education eventually judged her work to be an "innovative, effective literacy program" and provided a four-year dissemination grant which vaulted the program to the national level; teachers in 33 states and three U.S. territories have now been trained in her techniques. The "Image-Making Within the Writing Process" program is now part of Meadows's institute, with Olshansky serving as a project director for the Laboratory for Interactive Learning. "I've gone from working on my back porch to a time-and-a-half job running training programs around the country, and I owe it all to Dennis," Olshansky says. "He is a person who manifests things; he sees no limits. I never would have had the confidence or the vision to make it happen on my own."

While Dennis Meadows may see no limits to human potential, he is gravely concerned about mankind's ability to observe the limits of the earth's finite resources. Last year he was named one of the world's 100 most influential futurists, experts in the science of the future, on a list that includes Isaac Newton, Galileo, Darwin and Einstein. His inclusion on this list stems in part from his co-authorship of The Limits to Growth, and its sequel, Beyond the Limits, which raise the frightening specter of global collapse.

The books present the earth as a fragile system buckling under the combined effects of escalating population, depletion of natural resources and pollution. While their predictions are dire, the authors (who include systems analyst Donella Meadows and Jorgen Randers, vice president of the World Wildlife Fund) are careful to offer alternatives for a sustainable future, possible only if immediate and drastic action is taken to avert the present course of history.

Meadows learned his lessons well at MIT, where, while working on a Ph.D. in management, he absorbed, sponge-like, much of the wisdom and technique of systems dynamicist Jay Forrester and eminent psychologist Dan Marquist, an expert in organizational behavior. "Management is the most interdisciplinary of degrees, " Meadows explains.

Meadows won't tell you, without some prodding, that he suspects our species is ultimately too short-sighted and irrational to save itself and the planet. To borrow and revise a phrase from Pete Seeger, he prefers to think globally and act locally and globally. When he is not at UNH, he can be found anywhere on earth, planting the seeds of what he hopes will become a worldwide grassroots campaign to avert environmental disaster. His efforts were boasted by a recent $300,000-grant from Japan's Sasakawa Foundation to develop a workshop to train international leaders in the concepts of teambuilding, systems thinking, and sustainable development, which he has already tried out in the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Thailand and Zimbabwe.

Gillian Martin Mehers, academic director of a Rockefeller Foundation program that trains environmental leaders around the world, works closely with Meadows and describes his workshops as "extremely intense." "I think Dennis is personally convinced, as I am, that we have enough knowledge to solve the world's environmental problems and achieve sustainable development, but that there needs to be a major shift in perspectives and behavior towards more collaboration, trust and shared goals to achieve it," she says.

One of Meadows's favorite ways to engage people in critical issues is through game playing. His most well known game is Fishbanks, and it works like this: groups break into teams, which are given a few fishing boats and some money. The teams must devise strategies as to where they will fish and the size of their fleet. He has played Fishbanks hundreds of times around the world, with leaders from the United Nations and the World Bank, with New England's agricultural secretaries, with teachers and children. The result is nearly always the same: the teams quickly go bankrupt and deplete the entire fishery.

While it's game that, unfortunately, nearly everybody loses, players have a good deal of fun while learning valuable, if painful, lessons about the human condition. "People come to see that their natural inclination toward selfish, short-term gain ultimately works against them, destroying the resource that could have sustained them. And it gives them a chance to practice more sensible, life-sustaining behaviors," Meadows explains.

Just as Meadows is helping to construct international networks, he is simultaneously building systems of support on the UNH campus and across the state. Two years ago, he collaborated with the N.H. Charitable Fund to create and locate at UNH the Center for Public Policy Research, which, headed by well respected former legislator Doug Hall, provides research and analysis to state decision-makers on critical issues such as public education and the criminal justice system. Last year Meadows similarly helped launch New Futures, a privately funded venture led by John Bunker, aimed at assisting the state in dealing with one of its major public health threats: drug and alcohol abuse.

Both centers will draw on the intellectual capital of the University, using faculty expertise and research to serve the state. Meanwhile, Meadows is also revitalizing the UNH Survey Center, so it can form a productive triad with the other centers. "The criminal justice system is bankrupting New Hampshire," Meadows explains, adding that some 80 percent of prison inmates have substance abuse problems. "I think the centers can work collaboratively to help the state develop better policies and solutions than what now exists."

Meadows envisions another center at the University: the Center for Public Service within the next five years. The center would offer shared space to Cooperative Extension, the Institute on Disability, the Institute of Policy and Social Science Research and other groups that serve the public. "It would put 100 people together under circumstances where they could explore areas of collaboration and economies of scale," Meadows explains. "Helping to make that center happen is going to become my major preoccupation next spring."

Jan Nisbet, director of UNH's Institute on Disability and another powerful force on campus, offers key insights into the way he works. "Most people work within the system or outside the system, and some people perceive Dennis as one who can freely do both," she says. "But I see him as someone who understands the connections between systems and people, and who brings them together to creatively solve problems."

But not everyone appreciates Meadows's sometimes loose association with standard protocol. Those who don't share in his larger vision speak of a large ego. He can be impatient and condescending when confronted by people he views as obstacles or whose work he doesn't respect. And like many of the world's geniuses, he suffers from those occasional lapses in the appropriate social graces. Even his most ardent fans admit that he can intimidate. "Dennis is sort of a human cyclone," relates one staff member. "When we know he's coming over, this low-pressure system begins to build and there's a lot of tension. He comes in like a storm with this incredible whirlwind of mental energy that leaves us kind of dazed afterward."

Yet when new ideas and ways of thinking are in demand, it's often Dennis Meadows who gets the call. Dean of Liberal Arts Marilyn Hoskin, whose college houses Meadows's institute, says he is "clearly a major innovator" whose ability to think "out of the box immediately" is a hot commodity on campus. "He helps all of us immeasurably in getting a bead on the core of problems we face and how to work most effectively to deal with them." Ted Kirkpatrick, the College's associate dean, adds color to her comments: "Dennis is a wildman who's incredibly impatient with the pace of the world. His intellectual curiosity is absolutely unbound by convention."

Not surprisingly, Meadows has a core group of loyal staff members to help him run his many ventures. The staff seem to enjoy the non-heirarchical, flexible structure of the office, although they say keeping up with the boss can be daunting. In the course of a day, Meadow's assistant, Ken Collinson '97, can be found setting up international conferences, researching employment trends in the state or investigating new business opportunities. But he says his biggest daily challenge is "seeing the picture as big as Dennis does."

Collinson will leave his position to attend law school in the fall. When asked who his successor should be, Collinson, who's 41, blurts out, half joking, "Someone younger!"

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