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

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

It may not be hard to give up having GDP growth as an economic goal, but it is going to be far harder to overcome our addiction to it.

it was trying to think through how to do the needful in the biosphere’s time of crisis, while orthodox economics failed to rise to the occasion, and stayed focused in its old analysis of capitalism, as if capitalism were the only possible political economy, thus freezing economics as a discipline like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car.

If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can’t just sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit. We must choose to limit growth ourselves. We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth’s life-supporting systems which we depend on for our e

Most of the institutions shaping the world today are incapable of imagining anything other than their everlasting existence. And so things carry on, no matter how toxic, how ridiculous, or how contrary to values that most people share.