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Cassandra’s curse: how “The Limits to Growth” was demonized
Ugo Bardi, The Oil Drum: Europe
Cassandra’s story is very old: she was cursed that she would always tell the truth and never be believed. But it is also a very modern story and, perhaps, the quintessential Cassandras of our age are the group of scientists who prepared and published in 1972 the book titled “The Limits to Growth”. With its scenarios of civilization collapse, the book shocked the world perhaps more than Cassandra had shocked her fellow Trojan citizens when she had predicted the fall of their city to the Achaeans. Just as Cassandra was not believed, so it was for the “Limits to Growth” which, today, is still widely seen as a thoroughly flawed study, wrong all along. This opinion is based only on lies and distortions but, apparently, Cassandra’s curse is still alive and well in our times.
The first book of the “The Limits to Growth” series was published in 1972 by a group of researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens III. The book reported the results of a study commissioned by a group of intellectuals who had formed the “Club of Rome” a few years before. It examined the evolution of the whole world’s economy by means of a mathematical model based on “system dynamics”, a method that had been developed earlier on by Jay W. Forrester. Using computers, a novelty for the time, the LTG world model could keep track of a large number of variables and of their interactions as the system changed with time. The authors developed a number of scenarios for the world’s future in various assumptions. They found that, unless specific measures were taken, the world’s economy tended to collapse at some time in 21st century. The collapse was caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution (this last element we would see today as related to global warming).
In 1972, the LTG study arrived in a world that had known more than two decades of unabated growth after the end of the Second World War. It was a time of optimism and faith in technological progress that, perhaps, had never been so strong in the history of humankind. With nuclear power on the rise, with no hint that mineral resources were scarce, with population growing fast, it seemed that the limits to growth, if such a thing existed, were so far away in the future that there was no reason to worry. In any case, even if these limits were closer than generally believed, didn’t we have technology to save us? With nuclear energy on the rise, a car in every garage, the Moon just conquered in 1968, the world seemed to be all set for a shiny future. Against that general feeling, the results of LTG were a shock.
(7 March 2008)
Zero, Now
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
The time has come to reconcile ourselves with a fundamental truth. Most of us were already alive when humanity went into overshoot and (sometime in the late 80’s) began using up the planet faster than the planet could replenish itself. And many of us will still be alive, when, by mid-century at the latest, we have returned again to being a sustainable, one-planet civilization.
Of course, we may prove ourselves to be an evil and criminally shortsighted generation. We may melt the ‘caps, log the Congo, burn the Amazon, slushie the tundra, acidify the ocean, drive half of all life into extinction and needlessly cause the deaths of billions of our fellow human beings. But I don’t think we will. I think enough of us are better than that, braver than that and bolder than that.
Which means that we have to stop pussy-footing around and speak plainly: our goal is to have zero impact within our lifetimes. Our goal is to provide reasonable affluence and high qualities of life for everyone of the planet, while reducing our CO2 emissions, toxic releases, ecosystem impacts and resource draw-downs to essentially nothing, because anything more than zero is wrong.
Put more precisely, any ecological impact beyond global biocapacity tends to undermine Earth’ natural systems, destroy ecosystem services and climate stability and ultimately destroy the options of our descendants. Worse yet, we are beginning to understand that more and more unsustainably intensive uses of the Earth bring increasing risks of passing catastrophic tipping points, and, indeed, that those tipping points may be closer than we think.
(10 March 2008)
Implementing Rhizome at the Community Level
Jeff Vail, Rhizome
This final essay in this five-part series, The Problem of Growth, looks at implementing rhizome at a community level. Rhizome does not reject community structures in favor of a “bunker mentality,” but rather requires community structures that embrace and facilitate the principles of rhizome at both the personal and community level. Ultimately a rhizome community is composed of rhizome individual or family nodes-participants who do not depend on the community for their basic survival, nor participants who expect to benefit from the community without contribution. Rather, both the individual and the community choose to participate with each other as equals in a non-zero-sum fashion.
The results-based focus of the community is essentially the same as the individual, because the community consists of individuals who recognize the ability of the community to help them build resiliency and self-sufficiency in the provision of their basic needs, as well as the ability to access a broader network beyond the community.
Water
The first thing that communities can do is to get out of the way of individuals’ attempts to create water self-sufficiency: remove zoning and ordinance hurdles that prevent people from practicing rainwater collection and storage, or that mandate people keep their front lawns watered. Communities can also address their storm water policies-many communities simply direct storm water into the ocean (see Los Angeles, for example), rather than effectively storing it in percolation ponds, or otherwise retaining it for community use. Communities can also facilitate the collection and sharing of water-collection and efficiency best practices, as well as help people to refine ideas from outside the community in a locally-appropriate manner. The possibilities are endless-as with virtually everything else here, the key is that the community recognize the issue and make a conscious effort to address it.
…Further Reading: See John Robb’s post The Resilient Community for another take on this topic.
(10 March 2008)
Contributor Jerry recommends the series of five articles which are listed here.
