Sublime

Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” 3

In order to soften our main environmental impacts, we need to find ways, globally, to

If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits.

technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem. People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone. So

Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.

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

Just as there is an outer boundary of resource use, an “environmental ceiling” beyond which lies unacceptable environmental degradation, so too there is an inner boundary of resource use, a “social foundation” below which lies unacceptable human deprivation.

We’ll also have to do something about deforestation and other uses of land, which together add a net 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere while also destroying essential wildlife habitats.1