Book Review: ‘Limits to Growth’ Thirty Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows.

When ‘Limits to Growth’ was first published back in 1972 the very idea that a computer program could, let alone should be used to predict an end to what everyone considered to be human progress upset a great number of people. After all, in the years following the end of World War 2 the world had seen unprecedented growth. Hundreds of millions of people in the developed countries of the world, the middle class, had achieved a level of material wealth beyond that of even the very rich just a few generations earlier. Automobiles, homes in the suburbs, vacations in far off places by air travel and, perhaps best of all television were just the more visible signs of a progress that it seemed would never end.

All of the material things we want out of life can be summed up in the word PROSPERITY. So can too much prosperity actually be a bad thing? (Credit: The Place Brand Observer)
Front Cover of a first edition of ‘Limits to Growth’ back in 1972. (Credit: Amazon)

In fact one of the most criticized aspects of ‘Limits to Growth’ was the fact that the authors used all of that evidence of progress as a sign that ‘the end was near’! The faster the rate of progress, the higher the speed of growth they maintained the sooner human civilization will smack into one or another of the limits imposed by a finite Earth like a speeding car hitting a brick wall.

This is what can happen when you pay too much attention to your desires and to little to your surroundings! Is modern civilization too concentrated on economic growth whatever the long-term cost? (Credit: Giphy)

And to be honest ‘Limits to Growth’ is in many ways an expansion of and refinement of the old model of Thomas Malthus who in his 1798 essay ‘On the Principle of Population’ pointed out that since population increases geometrically while the supply of food only increases arithmetically when times are good it isn’t long before there comes a crash and large numbers of people starve. But of course Malthus was wrong, everybody knows that, the world’s population today is nearly ten times what it was in his day and yet now most people are better fed than they were 250 years ago. So Malthus was wrong, end of story.

Advances in technology over the last two hundred years has allowed human civilization to avoid the dilemma posed by Thomas Malthus in 1798. But the obvious fact is that there is only so much of planet Earth we can exploit. The Malthusian choice still lies ahead of us. (Credit: Today in Science History)

That was fifty years ago when the first edition of ‘Limits to Growth’ was published. Since that time the pace of the world’s economic growth has slowed and much of what the authors suggested might happen is in fact occurring. Notice I said suggested might happen, not predicted, throughout the book the authors try to make it clear that they are not in the business of predicting the future. Rather they, and their computer analysis, are trying to assess possible futures.

As society and its economy grows it uses the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate. If we don’t learn to use our planet in a more sustainable fashion collapse will be the only outcome! (Credit: ResearchGate)

And most of all what the authors warn us about is that our modern civilization, unlike that of Malthus, has many limits, not just food production. And in the last fifty years agricultural land degradation, decreasing fish stocks have occurred alongside declining reserves of oil and gas and increasing pollution and greenhouse gas induced climate change. As our technology has grown so has the number of limits that we are approaching. Whether it be non-renewable resources like oil or renewable ones that are being overused like fish stocks, or if it’s the buildup of pollutants far faster than the environment has a chance to clean them up there are now so many limits that technology and a free market can’t fix all of the problems at the same time.

Modern technology has allowed fishermen to catch an ever increasing percentage of the fish in the ocean. The result is that it seems as if we now have more fishing boats than fish left to catch!(Credit: Kuli Kuli Foods)
And as our economy grows so does the amount of crap we just throw away. The Earth cannot handle all of our pollution so it has become another limit to our growth. (Credit: The Conversation)

So the authors of the original ‘Limits to Growth’ have published an update, including much of the data that has been gathered over the last 50 years and modifying their program by assessing what it was they got right back in 1972, and what they got wrong. And it’s important to point out that the author’s conclusions aren’t all doom and gloom. In fact the last two chapters of ‘Limits to Growth’ are devoted to the development of a sustainable society, there’s that word sustainable that we hear about all the time nowadays. Well the authors of ‘Limits to Growth’ were talking about a sustainable future 50 years ago and it’s still the best hope of avoiding a crash.

The UN has published a series of goals for the development of a sustainable future. Have you heard about them, very few people have! (Credit: The SustainabilityX Magazine)

As I said above, growth over the last 50 years has become strained; in much the same fashion that ‘Limits to Growth’ suggested it would it its first edition. Time is now running out, we can either choose to limit our growth ourselves, to achieve a sustainable society, or we can continue to proceed as we have the last 300 years and crash into one or more of the limits that nature will soon impose upon us. ‘Limits to Growth’ is a book that needs to be read, needs to be talked about, and needs to be understood today, because there’s precious little time left.

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