Customer Reviews

The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

"Limits to Growth," was the pathbreaking report to the Club of Rome. It caused outrage worldwide. Released just before the first oil crisis in 1973, the Report drew on the growing awareness of environmental impacts of human activity and predicted dire consequences if the then present rate and scale of natural resource consumption was not tempered.

The Report was also pathbreaking because it used a sophisticated simulation model that showed that intervention in one part of the ecological system has unexpected impacts on other pasrts of that system.

The Report should be required reading for all those interested in the human footprint. Justifiably, it generated heated controversy, with many labeling the Club of Rome as neo-Malthusian doomsayers. The fact that the analysis of the Report is still relevant today is an indication of its historic significance.

Although there are those who remain in denial about the foresight and wisdom of this book, today we are left in no doubt: there *are* limits to growth, and those who refuse to accept such realities accelerate the demise of our planet while also ignoring the depradations upon the public of corporations, religions, crime families and networks, and the "states" whose officials they all bribe and subvert.

The good news is that an entire literature has developed from this one little book, and there is a growing public awareness--as well as growing financial and corporate awareness--of the urgency of harmonizing our human behavior with the larger Earth system of which we are a part.

On the dark side:
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

A handful of current references that can trace their heritage back to this book, which is still worth reading today:
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

This Book was required reading and regurgitation for a university Geology course taken in 1974. Most of its doomsday like predictions have proven to be false. Part of the Scientific Method requires either discarding or seriously modifying a hypothesis in the face of contrary facts. There are the glaring facts that natural resources such as copper, gold, nickel, oil, zinc, etc., etc., were supposed to have been depleted by the year 2000 -- according to the authors and their "world model." These commodities, as of 2010 reports are not depleted. New sources are continuing to be discovered as have happened through-out human history.

Thus, the hypothesis model is wrong, the input data is wildly inaccurate, and/or serious computer programing glitches/bugs are lurking about. There is a valid under-current or basic message, associated with the title however.

That message is that business as usual - disregard for various side effects, including enviornmental, can not continue. There is a balance between shrub hugging, tree cuddling, bunny sniffers and myopic, bottom-line-profit, corporate morons. The mentality and methods of these extremes do more harm than good; there is ample historical evidence to illustrate the reality.

A better use of time and resources, that went into this book, would have been addressing and hypothesizing towards a very important goal:
Providing clean adequate drinking water and apt waste removal to EVERYONE on the planet. It would be a mighty first step to raising and equalizing living conditions...

What to say? Re-reading this book is like reading a history book of the future; written almost 40 years ago; and yet it could have been written today. Everything is on schedule - the program used for the simulation was primitive for modern standards and, yet, it worked surprising well. The crucial point of the "base case" scenario is that the collapse of the economy should start sometime after the first decade of the 21st century and there are ominous signs that we are going exactly in that direction.

Read this book with an unbiased mind and you will sleep much less soundly.....The rabid first reviewer of this book needs to read it again and then examine the world as it exists today. The conclusions of this seminal work are being born out in front of our very eyes. Prediction: Violent conflict over shrinking resources...ever hear of the Middle East and Oil? Prediction: New diseases create modern epidemics as nature fights back...uh, AIDs, SARS, the rise of anti-biotic resistant bacteria? Prediction: The rapid growth of industrialism and consumerism in Third World countries where the vast majority of the world's population lives will use up this planet's resources at a geometrically increasing pace. The US uses 45% of the world's energy. What happens when one billion Chinese all have a car?
The most frightening aspect of this book is the authors' willingness to include their critics wildest assumptions in their mathematical models. The point the authors are making is indisputable; it is not a matter of IF we are going to use up this planet's resources, it a matter of when.

This book looks at a few basic trends and asks what they mean on a world scale in the long term.

The main trend is the exponential increase in the human population - and the finite size of the earth, and resources of the earth.

Clearly these trends are real and cannot be discounted, the question the book asks is when and how will the finite size of the earth pose a problem to exponentially increaseing population.

I think there are legitamate questions over the details of the modelling (something the authors readily admit), but I have yet to see a constructive criticism that addressed the broad themes of this book.

The main predictions were in the 2050 - 2070 time scale - so critics claiming the book got it wrong about prediciting doomsday scenarios that didn't come true simply haven't read the book. But this highlights a very interesting thing - for some reason the book gets very heated responses from people, despite the fact that it is hard to deny the major trends it talks about - perhaps because it encourages a different world view than we are used to.

I still have notbreceived this book. Thus no review. Am disappointed as I do not know how to get it.

The book "Limits to Growth" certainly has changed the way I live. I first read this book over 20 years ago when I was in college. I was deeply impressed by the book, and also deeply worried for the world. More than 30 years after it was written, the problems we encounter today only confirm the predictions and intensify the worries about this planet (please see the 30-year update for this book). If everyone had read this book, the world should have been much better today. Now here's my prediction: the authors will receive a Nobel Peace Prize one day.

After years of hearing about what a seminal work this is, I finally broke down and bought a (used) copy. I expected something like the anti-Simon, an exhaustive documentation of how we are inevitably headed toward doom and collapse unless the government steps in to intervene with specific recommendations. I was extremely surprised to find that this book is nothing more than a long description of the authors' computer model! Is that it?! Apparently so.

The authors assembled a computer model of all human activity and natural science, complete with feedback, time delay, and other parameters (yeah, they really present it that way!). Then they ran it through a computer and found what they expected - quite a surprise, eh? Then they tweak on the basic model and find that almost nothing leads to a rosy scenario. Humanity is going to collapse by 2100, and there is nothing we can do about it. Well, almost nothing. Apparently, if we stop procreating, stop economic growth, and spread the existing wealth evenly, everything will be ... well, it won't be great, but it will be "okay", sorta like the warehousing activity that we call public "schooling". I think there is a book that describes the resulting society, ... I believe it was called _Anthem_.

I gave the book a couple of stars because of its canonical status, but it certainly doesn't deserve the attention it has gotten. A major flaw is that they don't describe the model they use in any significant detail to allow you to run the numbers yourself (they refer you to another article, and you can find the original model on the internet if you're perseverent enough). If someone is throwing this into your face as proof that we are headed to certain disaster, fear not. There simply isn't enough substance here, some of the information and assumptions are dated, and you can certainly point out a few holes in their model assumptions that tend to undo their long-term analysis. If you are thinking about using this to support your world view, please reconsider. Try something a little more grounded in reality, without the breathless hype, like any environmental economics book by Tom Tietenberg.

I was exposed by my lecturer at university to the video of Meadows describing his work. It was dated then. It is relevant now. It fills my mind with foreboding. I am taking action to sidestep the catastrophe. We need more volunteers to feed the "neo-Malthusian" future. I am grateful to deniers. Their sacrifice is truly appreciated. I hope this book does not get too popular. "Rots of ruck Reroy."