It’s Time to Acknowledge the Limits to Growth
Fifty years ago, a dedicated young team of researchers from MIT, assembled by Jay Forrester (the father of Systems Dynamics) and led by Dr. Dennis Meadows, embarked on a two year study to model data to explore what they considered a foregone conclusion — that there is a limit to growth on a finite planet, much like there is a limit to life expectancy for any living object. While the basic premise of limits was assumed, the research and modelling highlighted specific physical limits to Earth systems, such as to water, soil, metals, and other resources. Then they made projections as to the exploitation and eventual depletion of said systems.
The original 1970–1972 study focused on five key areas of human impact on the Earth systems: population, industrial goods, food/agriculture, non-renewable resources and persistent pollution. As to the results? In short, the “standard run” scenario in their model projected that the prevailing growth policies in the developed world (and aspired to in the developing world) would ultimately lead to overshoot and collapse. But on the plus side, of the twelve scenarios presented in the model, four showed a sustainable future that reached an “attractive” (in Dr. Meadows words) global equilibrium without collapse. So what was the catch?
The catch was, that in order to reach a sustainable state, changes to “business as usual” (i.e. the “standard run” model that was one of eight scenarios leading to collapse) needed to be made, not just on a technical front through human innovations, but on a cultural one as well. This means that we can’t just invent our way out of the problem, by creating, for example, more fuel-efficient industrial processes (thus solving a technical issue), if at the same time we are creating more worldwide customers eager to consume more materials and energy, thereby perpetuating a cultural/societal issue of increased consumption.
Climate change had not been rigorously studied at this time and was mentioned only in passing in the original study, but follow-up studies to LTG in 1992 and 2004 incorporated increasingly more references to the current science. Regardless of its omission from the original study, climate change certainly qualifies as a by-product of the exponential population and industrial growth, as well as its own sub-category under pollution. In fact, Meadows would later describe climate change and the related biosphere degradation as a “symptom,” not a “cause,” of our having passed the limits of growth and entering ecological “overshoot” in terms of the carrying capacity of the planet.
Like others embarking on quests for knowledge before them, Dr. Meadows and his researchers may have been a bit naïve when they published the results of their study in the book “The Limits to Growth,” expecting that the information presented would be, if not exactly welcomed, then at least taken seriously. What they actually got upon announcing the study’s results to the world at large — that humankind’s impact on the Earth systems was already threatening to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by 1972 — was nearly universal pushback from the powerbrokers of that time. Instead of embracing the study’s conclusions and suggestions for sustainable development to avoid a catastrophic future, the gatekeepers of the global “Pax UN” sought to undermine the validity of the projections in a barrage of negative publicity.
But then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the leaders of industry and their client politicians — and pretty much everyone else who had a vested interest in perpetuating the system of exploitation and leverage that had been ordained as our Capitalist Global model — are not interested in hearing that we need to change our ways, ways that have generated significant profits for those same parties, in order to avoid the collapse scenario at some point in the coming century. Based on your own experiences, you would probably also not be astonished to learn that humans are not good at incurring a short-term cost today for a long-term benefit in the future, even if it means not incurring such a cost today will likely result in having no future. This conundrum is a symptom of our collective insanity.
As I’ve pointed out in past op-eds, by only just now starting to make cursory changes to how we operate, adjustments that we should have implemented decades ago — put simply, they just are not going to be enough. Not enough in the same way that a lifetime’s avoidance of daily dental care will not be ameliorated by the sudden uptake of flossing in one’s senior years. The damage has been done.
To paraphrase from one of Dr. Meadow’s recent interviews on the subject, concepts like “sustainable development,” that made sense in the 1970s through the 90s, are now really more of an oxymoron. This conclusion is supported by a former sustainability expert, Professor Jem Bendell, and the work he now does via his Deep Adaptation framework. As he describes it, at this point it’s more about building resilience into the system and adapting to on-going disruptive circumstances, while at the same time keeping a promise to the next generation by continuing to draw down emissions in order to mitigate against the worst “Hothouse Earth” scenarios.
Dr. Meadows describes himself not as a pessimist, but as a realist, and it is in that same spirit that I’ve written this article; not to depress you, but to coax you into acknowledging that every choice you make about how you consume resources and energy (read: how you earn and spend your time and money) either continues the inertia of the standard run or becomes part of the mitigation and pivot towards resilience and adaptation. This inertia is so insidious and powerful that even the teed-up opportunity for systemic changes offered by this horrendous pandemic now seems likely to be derailed by countries trying to quickly reboot growth measured in such antiquated measurements as GDP.
We simply cannot keep operating under the same paradigm today and hope that tomorrow will be different. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that got us here in the first place.
P.S. If you feel anxious and want some ideas (limited but illustrative) on changing your personal paradigm, click here.
