The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update Book

Updated slightly, 12/1/17 (a few links added, below):

"We must not succumb to despair, for there is still the odd glimmer of hope." Edouard Saouma, 1993 [And yes, one of my points is that there is remains a little hope, as we approach 2018. My other point is that Meadows wrote this in 1993, a quarter of century ago; those odd glimmers of hope continue, but are growing fainter.]

In 1972 three MIT scientists developed a computer model for examining current trends in global resource production. They updated their report in 1992, and again in 2004 with this book. I didn't read it in 2004 though I read reviews of it and executive summaries. I read it now. As they have tracked consistently since 1972, the authors show that humans have created a condition they call "overshoot," (using more than the planet can sustain) which can only lead to global catastrophe. And this is not some little scientific secret; in each version of this report, millions of copies have been sold. The authors aren't in the practice of making predictions; they show you models for what will happen if you do this or that. And we are'some good news to the contrary'doing almost exclusively "this"'leading to global catastrophe, rather than "that," which is in earnest beginning what they say is absolutely required, what they call "the revolution of sustainability," the third revolution after the agricultural and industrial revolutions that profoundly changed the planet.

Their point is that there are still (in 2004, 14 years ago) choices to make:

"People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment."

This book was written before Trump and his unlimited growth climate deniers were elected/appointed. And the past forty years, the authors cite clearly, has shown climate change to be the most terrifying example of overshoot. The ice caps are melting, fresh water is disappearing, species die-off continues unabated, forests are being wiped out, and only small dents into carbon emissions are being made. Consumer/industrialism capitalism continues at a steady, ominous pace. The Paris Accord was encouraging in its acknowledgement that the threats to catastrophe are real, but for the major contributors to climate change, only baby steps were taken.

What to do? To make the choices we have not yet fully made will require a Marshall Plan-level of global commitment. After all the charts and models, the authors include a chapter that suggests that in addition to science and technological innovation, certain principles will also be necessary for sustainability : Visioning, net-working, truth-telling, learning, and loving.

And they insist that strict industrial and corporate regulations will be necessary to enact a sustainable planet. In the kind of "post-fact" world where this very week Trump has moved to dismantle many regulations he sees as limiting business growth, it is hard to be optimistic about the future: "Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised."

If you look world-wide, there are groups of people and even sometimes entire nations moving in the right direction. The foundation for renewable energy resources is being developed in some places at a pace the authors of this volume might have hoped for half a century ago. This is good news. Too little too late? Probably, I write on December, 2017.

The authors wrote this in their 2004 report. I ahem no idea if they also said it in 1972, but things were indeed said like this during that decade about the planet:

"Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today."

Here is my review of State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? By the Worldwatch Institute:



There's also this to consider, a warning in November 2017 from the science community:

But then there's now this: 16,000 scientists sign dire warning to humanity over health of planet:



And then there's this. Lake Chad, in northern Africa, was one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, the size of New Jersey. It is now 95% gone. Here's an article, out now, 12/2017 about this very real disaster:

Lake Chad was once the size of New Jersey, is now 95 % gone: