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: