L i m i t s  T o  G r o w t h



I obtained my paperback copy of Limits To Growth back in 1974 during my second semester of college. I spent a lot of time in the school library hoping to go beyond the general concepts my instructors were feeding me. In a short time I became hopelessly distracted by the wealth of reading materials there. While I was not an avid reader by any means, I had become totally engaged by socioeconomic issues such as population growth, world food supply and it's demand on agriculture and on our naturally fertile soils, and our disproportionate consumption of the world's resources. Subsequently I was drawn deep to technical discussions on pollution and the environmental degradation resulting from every human activity imaginable. Over the course of the year I devoured titles like Our Plundered Planet, The Closing Circle, Silent Spring, Too Many, and Famine 1975 (to name a few). The more I read the more I hungered to understand it all. While my comprehension and assimilation of so much technical information and analysis was sufficient, I was continuously searching for the ultimate assessment, the truly "biggest" picture.
It had to be out there ... one complete document, the highest level view that encompassed the sum total of all the component problems feeding our human predicament. I needed to know where and what this insidious slide would lead us to. And most importantly, would there be enough time to either figure out a way to reverse the trend? Or would we not stop until collapse was imminent? I stumbled upon Limits To Growth in a bookstore. Within the first chapter I realized I had found the analysis I considered critical to human survival.

In 1970 an international team of scientists at MIT were commissioned by the Club of Rome to conduct one of the boldest studies of all time. The project: to generalize the human predicament to some comprehensible form. With the aid of a computer this team representing a variety of disciplines attempted to construct such a simulation. While far from perfect, the end result produced a relative timeline based on global trends in consumption leading to the ultimate critical mass, the simple convergence of supply versus demand.

Beyond The Limits, the sequel to Limits To Growth followed about 20 years later in 1992. What had changed? Was the slide proceeding at the same rate? Had the earliest predictions or signs of environmental degradation appeared yet? While there were no absolute predictions of doom in the original text, did any of the warnings prove to be without basis? Now I was newly obsessed with knowing the answers!


Websites:
Various discussions, essays and on-line references to "Limits To Growth".

Literature:
A partial list of literary references to "Limits To Growth".


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Last Updated November 2nd, 2001