The Limits to Growth

"This is such a depressing book. This is The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update . A lot of people, what they remember about The Limits to Growth is it was published in 1971 and was completely lambasted by economists, technologists, lots and lots of people. What it has sitting underneath it is a model of the world, a model of the world economy, which links population, food, industrial production, pollution, a few other things, it’s quite a complicated systems-dynamics model. Obviously it’s only a model, it’s a picture of the world, it isn’t the world itself. But what it said was that if our behaviour as a society didn’t change, we would end up with industrial collapse in the mid-2020s and a population collapse in the mid-2030s. Economists said, ‘Oh well, that’s obviously wrong because there’s going to be an economic response to those changes’, and technologists say, ‘Oh no that’s obviously wrong because we’ll find technology to change those things’. This is the thirty year update, around the same time it came out some academics did some work looking at Limits to Growth as a prediction and discovered that the way the world had gone since 1971 was an alarmingly close fit to the Limits to Growth model. There were some things wrong with their first model and they’ve improved it. There are two things here. At the moment we’re in an overshoot and collapse path, but the first thing is that they’re very clear we can change that, we can still change that now. The second thing is, when you talk to the technologists and the economists a lot of their models assume that things happen straight away. This is a system dynamics model, so it’s got a lot of delays, it’s got a lot of buffers. No matter how good the technology is – and we learn this from Carlotta Perez as well – it takes time. Sometimes putting a technology fix in shoves the can down the road rather than fixing the problem. Sometimes it just doesn’t come in fast enough to solve the problem. Given where we are – exceeding our planetary limits – this is probably the single most important futures book out there right now. For both the reasons that the core model is clearly reputable now – it’s proven itself over time – and also because it does have some observations about how we’d need to change to make change happen, to get out of overshoot and collapse. There’s a state in which you overshoot and oscillate, where you’re sometimes over the limits and sometimes under the limits, which gives you enough capacity to get back. We’re getting alarmingly close to the point where we don’t even have that option any more. Malthusians, yes. In the 1970s this was a very clear expression of an environmentalist world view – it was commissioned by the Club of Rome and effectively the people who lined up on the other side were not environmentalist in their world view. And you still see the same thing. The dominant establishment was technologically driven, economically driven, and that’s still the case. Probably much more so than it was in the 1970s. It wasn’t used to hearing arguments about planetary limits in the 1970s. You had a classic clash of world views. It wasn’t about the model, it was about what the model was saying about a view of the world. That’s quite a useful thing that futures can do sometimes. When you do a set of scenarios I quite often say, ‘What’s the world view that sits underneath these different scenarios?’ Understanding what those are is often as important as any of the rest of the work. At least once you understand what your assumptions are about the future, you can start arguing about whether those assumptions are reasonable and whether they’re a fair thing to hold. It goes back to metaphors and layers of meaning. Sometimes when you make those values explicit you realise that those aren’t values you want to be holding, but you’ve been ticking over in the everyday organisational behaviour: horizon 1 behaviour. If you want to be a rich futurist, you write an optimistic book about America’s future. As long as it gets a decent publisher exposure, your fees and your invitations on the speaker circuit just blossom. Whether it’s honest or not, I don’t know."

"In the book, three scientists from MIT looked at five variables: World population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion. They put population and consumption on the existing path of exponential growth, and showed that we’re going to start running out of resources and it’s going to start impacting civilisation. They projected pollution, food shortages and so on. The book was written 30 years ago. I read it in the 1980s and it made a big impact on me. The predictions were pretty accurate. They foresaw the strains of growth, and the wear on our planet is certainly starting to show. So it’s a good book, an easy read and it gives you some idea of what we’re up against. We must clean up our environment and find cleaner sources of energy. Any model of society or human behavior is not going to be entirely accurate but nonetheless there is explosive growth, and if we don’t find the technology to replace oil we’re going to be in trouble. We have the know-how to produce the technology that can keep pace. Solar, wind – these technologies can supply a large fraction of the requirements of our civilisation, as long as we don’t keep growing exponentially. So we need to find new clean energy sources and become very, very efficient."

"This is a report produced in 1972, but it’s still as current now as it was then and is still available today. It was commissioned by the Club of Rome and produced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they did was simply to look at projections for world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion and draw up models of what would happen to the earth in those areas. At the heart of it was the message that we need to make wiser use of the earth’s finite resources. That is true now and it was true 30 years ago. We have to get into a different mindset about the earth’s resources. It’s not saying that everything is going to run out tomorrow, but if we get smart there is no reason why the earth shouldn’t be able to sustain us way into the future. Tricky question! But if we take, for example, the aluminium can – we are all familiar with that – if it was in a closed loop cycle, if nearly every can were recycled, then, clearly the amount of aluminium that would need to be mined would be very small. It’s easy to see how the economy can keep churning with renewable resources in that way, but with oil and gas, these are strictly finite. There are a lot of hydrocarbons in the world and, though not everybody agrees with me, I think there will always be a lot simply because we will stop using them for environmental reasons long before it runs out. You want laughs? Yes, it’s written for the layperson so it’s very readable. I wouldn’t choose anything unreadable unless you think Moby-Dick is unreadable."

"Well this book was originally written in the 1970s by a group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is when I was first involved in family planning campaigning in the early 70s. Books like this predicted that there would be famines in the future due to the rising population. They also drew attention to the beginnings of atmospheric global warming. This particular book takes another look at what was said 30 years ago, so you can see how things actually did turn out. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In terms of famine the timing was wrong because food technology postponed chronic shortages. But for the last few years we have actually seen an increase in the number of people starving. It’s now over a billion people going hungry in the world today. So these predictions may well still prove to be right, although 20 years later than they originally thought. They got right the projections about carbon emissions and the fundamental point that there are limits to growth. And this has been proven through the economic and population growth that has taken place since then which is now pushing us to the very limits of sustainability. When I read the original version there was a lot that chimed with my own personal feeling about what was happening with nature, and there were things that alarmed me. Such as the predictions of severe food shortages, and of course this didn’t actually happen. But the rest of it was pretty well right."