Reviews for The population alternative

The average rating for The population alternative based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-22 00:00:00 John Rix One of the most important environmental books of all time, which I actually read as millions others did in 1972, largely "discredited" by the "establishment" Pro-Growth industry. It was written by a group of several assembled thinkers--scientists and industrialists, working together, imagine that--of the time called The Club of Rome. It was translated into dozens of languages, and in 1979, some U. S. poll had it that while a third of this country was "pro-growth," another third was actually "anti-growth," consistent with E. P. Shumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, which everyone I knew then also read. Here's a short summary of what it said: 1. If the trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, water availability and other resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next 100 years; 2. It is possible to be alert to these growth trends and establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his or her individual human potential; 3. If the world's people decide to strive for the second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chance for success. The short story, 1972-2016: The economic growth people won and the planet lost.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-01 00:00:00 Mark Mandel A groundbreaking book that is even more relevant today than when it was written. It was widely criticised at the time and is now often written-off as having been 'widely discredited' - obviously only by people who haven't read the book. As they say many, many times, it is not a prediction - nor could it ever be - but rather an attempt to investigate the "behavior modes" of a connected system of exponential growth and positive feedback loops with finite resources. No-one can model the future of the entire complex global system with any kind of definitive predictive accuracy, but they can still provide very useful insights into the potential behaviour of a system. No transition can be pinpointed to one time or one place, but a message of caution is still relevant. Their message was simply this: As the pace of growth increases exponentially, delays in system feedbacks could prove catastrophic as the response time can be too slow to avoid overshoot and an inability to maintain levels of food production, industrial output and capital, and therefore population. No matter how they modified resource levels and technological growth, unchecked growth always ended up with overshoot and collapse. So far we have managed to avoid all of the limits we've faced collectively, but as the world gets faster and faster, every limit passed simply exposes us to a new one. I compare it to the speed of cars. We have surpassed many of the limits to vehicles in modern times, each capable of higher performance, but yet we have still had speed limits which haven't changed for decades. That is because we recognise that no matter how good the vehicles become, the reaction time and abilities of the driver stay the same. The faster we go, the lower the tolerance for error, and the bigger the mess if anything goes wrong. It is a sobering read, but it was also a positive one, in that it presented options for how to avoid overshoot. The only problem is that that was 40 years ago. In more recent runs of the model they can no longer find a plausible set of input parameters that avoid overshoot. So let's hope the next limits we encounter are enough of a close call to wake us up to realising that we can't grow materially forever, but not so bad as to be catastrophic.