In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global ‘overshoot,’ or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.
Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognized for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.
In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.
Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development.
Customer Reviews
Essential reading, but only part of the story:
No one likes limits, but they’re with us all our lives, from the restrictions our parents place on us as children to the limits that society and Mother Nature compel us to adhere to as adults. The authors do a clear and thorough job of explaining how physical limits affect the Earth and the human society evolving within it.
Updating their mathematical model and learning from three decades of experience since the original 1972 study, the authors reinforce their earlier finding that persistently overshooting the Earth’s carrying capacity could lead to any one of a variety of unhappy scenarios for humanity. While expressing due respect for technology development and the effects of free markets, they emphasize that these are necessary but not sufficient tools for getting us through the 21st century.
The authors have been criticized as doomsayers whose predictions have proven wrong. Such criticism obviously has come from people who have not actually read their work. They have not produced just a single computer run of their model and then proclaimed, “This is what will happen.” They have done hundreds of runs to attempt to illustrate how important variables - such as population growth, industrial production, technological development, and pollution - interact to shape future scenarios in a 100-year timeframe. A thorough reading of this book demonstrates that rather than being disproven, their original scenarios are looking ominously accurate.
Chapter 5 is the book’s good-news story, providing a case study on how the world got together to tackle the ozone depletion problem over the last quarter century. This and the final two chapters demonstrate that the authors have not given in to hopelessness.
The most critical shortcoming of the authors’ work is one they clearly acknowledge. They address flows of population, materials, energy, and emissions that can be mathematically modeled, but do not include factors such as military conflict, large-scale corruption, natural disasters, pandemics, or severe economic stresses like currency and debt crises. If these things are taken into account, one could view the Limits to Growth model as wildly optimistic. What would this study look like with a non-quantitative social futurist perspective added to it?
The authors have done a remarkable job of clearly explaining concepts such as positive and negative feedback loops and the Earth’s sources and sinks as they apply to the model. But the 284 pages of text may be more than can be absorbed and digested by the wider audience this book deserves. Perhaps a condensed version is needed, one that captures the message and its urgency but is short enough to get even policy-makers to read it.
Here we go again…:
This book was required reading for me in my Political Science class over 20 years ago when I was in college. By this point in human history, humanity was supposed to be doomed. I agree with a previous reviewer who pointed out that the authors simply fail to take into account human ingenuity and the resilience of the planet and its inhabitants.
But hey, if you want to incessantly worry and fret, this book is probably for you.
limits to growth CD:
I hoped the CD would contain more material but it didn’t give me more than reading the book.
Please don’t misinterpret the book:
MG Phelps (below) misinterprets the work of LtoG by thinking it was a gloom and doom prediction. Quite to the contrary, we can place the research of Donella, et al within the context of the argument Phelps makes and see that its cautions and suggestions are phenomenologically healthy responses of a system attempting to adapt to changes. The books argues what must change, not HOW that change ought to occur. I wonder if Phelps even read the research at all, or just read reviews of it from the neo-classical economists that still believe growth is the solution to the problems that growth is causing us.
Others also point out that the original LtoG report was “inaccurate” because people (and our economy) DID respond to it proactively–but only to the point of delaying the inevitable. The fact of the matter is that human resource consumption is still rampantly (exponentially) growing, that we have exceeded our global ecological carrying capacity, and that our future is dimmer than it otherwise would be for the reason that we will have less clean air, soil, water, nonrenewable minerals, etc to work with. So tell me what the economy would substitute for clean mineralized water??
In this sense one might hope that humanity DOES NOT for its sake find another source of cheap low entropy matter-energy to exploit (like fossil fuels), because if it does, it makes the systemic collapse of global ecosystems (and the ecosystem services they provide us) that much more likely. Right now we are showing the collective maturity of a bacteria colony in a petri dish. Again, I ask, what does the author propose we subsitute for ecosystem services such as the cleaning of our air? A technological solution will not work because it is inherently reductionist, whereas the factors that are currently involved in cleaning our air are much more efficient, effective and multifunctional (trees aren’t just air scrubbers).
Also, why wait until all wood becomes prohibitively expensive before stopping the rampant destruction of forests? By then, it will be too late. As the ecological economist Robert Costanza points out, those trees and forest ecosystems are more valuable as ecosystems than as “aggregates of resources for exploitation” within our economy.
Failed predictions:
I admit to not ahveing read the latest edition of this work. But I have read the previous two and unless there have been changes of substance, which other reviews here suggest has not happened, I will not be wasting my money on the new edition. The reason is that the authors’ work entirely fails to take into account the way in which human ingenuity, stimulated in part by price changes which scarcity should surely bring about, has made, and can be expected to continue to make, adaptations in how resources are used and extracted. Indeed things that were never thought to be resources can be made into resources; deposits that were uneconomic to exploit can become economic if prices rise. The issues were all set out very clearly by economists when the first great scare broke out in the mid 1970s (when we were told we were going to run out of crucail resources by the year 2000). I suggest googling two important papers by Yale’s William Nordhaus in Brooking Papers for a comprehensive critique of the two previous editions. This is not to say that resources are infinite, they clearly are not. But nor is the life of this planet, which is doomed to end when our sun reaches later stages of its life cycle. The big question is when we run out of renewable resouces and how soon we can replace thenm by renewable ones. The sort of analysis in the work of the Limits to Growth team ignores so much of the possible adaptations that a well funtioning economic system can be expected to make that it is of no help in answering the big question.
