The news of Elinor Ostrom's (the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics) death has sent shock waves in the sustainability science community. There have already been many touching and excellent obituaries, including in the NY Times and the Stockholm Resilience Centre website.

I think a lot of her ideas and work coalesce to a take-home message that can be summed up in a statement from a 2010 interview with YES! magazine, where Ostrom said in answering what her message to the general public would be, "Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth."