Limits to Growth at 50: the groundbreaking study that failed to change the world

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to t

We have dozens of ideas for how to fix the problem, but we dare not implement them because doing so might undermine growth. And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen. Instead, the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological breakdown also report excitedly on how GDP is growing every quarter, and the very

While some of the predictions made were delayed by the extraordinary resilience of the planetary system, recent research suggests that we are now very close to witnessing the collapse scenario of ‘business as usual’ that the authors warned of. In their 30 years up-date to Limits to Growth the authors emphasized:

This realisation first struck home in 1972, when a team of scientists at MIT published a groundbreaking report titled Limits to Growth. The report outlined findings from the team’s cutting-edge work using a powerful computer model called World3, which was designed to analyse complex ecological, social and economic data from 1900 to 1970, and to pre

This distinction was brought home to me by collapse theorist, sci-fi novelist, and, former Archdruid of North America, John Michael Greer.20 “A controlled, creative transition to sustainability might have been possible,” Greer argues, “if the promising beginnings of the 1970s had been followed up in the ’80s and ’90s.” But our politicians and CEOs