The Limits to Growth
A Report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind
Donella H. Meadows and Dennis L. Meadows
With and
Having read it
★★★★☆
Prescient and progressive in its predictions and insights and clear and to the point in an accessible and open way that proves (and proved in the 1970s!) that these issues and insights should be explored and evolved proactively and without the endless need or searching for, certainly, economic growth.
Just makes you wonder where humanity’s priorities went and seem to be still going in the early twenty-first century – do we ever learn?
Just technology is not the answer to the many self-made problems and issues of humanity:
The hopes of the technological optimists centre on the ability of technology to remove or extend the limits to growth of population and capital. We have shown that in the world model the application of technology to apparent problems of resource depletion or pollution or food shortage has no impact on the essential problem, which is exponential growth in a finite and complex system. Our attempts to use even the most optimistic estimates of the benefits of technology in the model did not prevent the ultimate decline of population and industry, and in fact did not in any case postpone the collapse beyond the year 2100.
In a concluding personal aside to this review, this book was listed on an old (2007) reading list of mine that I had found (from another sort and clear out!) and, being curious of what the book might be about, some searching of the internets presented its availability as an eBook from The Donella Meadows Project, Academy for Systems Change – brilliant, generous and a big thanks to them making it freely available in ePub format!
A good passage
[...] Recycling and better product design are expensive; in most parts of the world today they are considered ‘uneconomic’. Even if they were effectively instituted, however, as long as the driving feedback loops of population and industrial growth continue to generate more people and a higher resource demand per capita, the system is being pushed toward its limit – the depletion of the earth’s nonrenewable resources.
A second good passage
Applying technology to the natural pressures that the environment exerts against any growth process has been so successful in the past that a whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities.
A third good passage
As for the incentive that would encourage men to produce such technological advances, what better incentive could there be than the knowledge that a new idea would be translated into a visible improvement in the quality of life? Historically mankind’s long record of new inventions has resulted in crowding, deterioration of the environment, and greater social inequality because greater productivity has been absorbed by population and capital growth. There is no reason why higher productivity could not be translated into a higher standard of living or more leisure or more pleasant surroundings for everyone, if these goals replace growth as the primary value of society.