Review and giveaway! 'Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update'

The world (as we know it) is coming to an end. The authors of this book predicted as much back in 1972, and then again in 1992, 2002... and now? That future is here.

By Lisa Brunette

Every once in a while, a great book comes along that takes the threads of ideas you’ve thought about and wondered over and crystalizes them into a cohesive narrative. Limits to Growth is one of those books.

The idea threads have to do with climate change, resource depletion, and something I’ve been aware of for at least a decade and that I see more and more people discussing now: late empire.

Reading Limits to Growth, the hardest and most crucial aspect to wrap your mind around is the crux of the book itself, the basis for the title, ‘limits to growth.’ This is: Exponential growth cannot go on forever. Progress is, in fact, finite.

It’s a really hard concept for people to grasp, as we are taught from birth that progress is a given, that humanity will continue to climb steadily higher toward our inevitable Star Trek future. And for sure, those of us lucky enough to have been born in first-world countries have been very fortunate to ride the crest of exponential growth for the past couple of hundred years due to fossil fuel discovery and innovation. However, we cannot assume that will continue. In the 2020 preface to the updated edition, the authors argue

We know absolutely that physical growth on this planet will stop. We do not know precisely when, though our computer scenarios suggest it will happen in this century, probably within the next decades.

As they demonstrate, energy sources such as fossil fuels are finite; no new replacements for these resources are being created, at least not at the rate we use them. Those of you who followed the “peak oil” movement in the 2000s know what I’m talking about. But if this idea is new to you, maybe you can picture it: What happens when all of that black gold, that Texas tea, stops a-bubblin’ up? What will power our cars, our washers and dryers, our home heating systems?

The authors aren’t saying that we’re going to run out of oil tomorrow, or that the apocalypse is imminent. But the problem comes in when the amount of energy required to extract a resource is greater than what can be gained from that resource. This means definite decline, likely sometime over the next century, or perhaps as soon as in the next decade or two. Maybe we’re already seeing it.

The other part of the equation is environmental. The way we use fossil fuels—and the products stemming from them—is often enormously damaging to the natural world. The authors frame this effect in terms of “sinks.” While these sinks can absorb some pollution and still recover, there are hard limits to how much they can take.

What happens when the amount of pollution overwhelms the sinks? And what if that occurs at the same time the resources themselves have been depleted so low, the cost to extract them is greater than their energy payoff?

The Limits to Growth authors—preeminent environmental scientists Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows—first sounded a warning bell about all of this back in 1972, when the book was first published. A surge of conservation efforts due to the dual energy crises in 1973 and 1979 shortly ensued. Those of us who were around in the 1970s recall efforts to weatherstrip homes and other lengths to conserve energy. Ah… those were the good ol’ days…

Remember when you’d beg your parents to turn on the A/C, and they’d say, “Not till it’s up over 90 degrees?”

By the 1980s, though, with the energy crisis seemingly averted, everyone went back to business as usual. But the long-term scenario hadn’t changed; the hard limits on available resources and nature’s ability to absorb waste still existed. Concerned that an opportunity had been tragically missed, the authors reissued Limits to Growth in 1992, and then again in 2002.

Sadly, nothing changed either time.

Now it’s really too late to avoid the worst-case scenario outlined in Limits to Growth. And that’s collapse.

In other words, the answer to my questions above is not… exactly a rosy picture. What happens when we reach all of these hard limits? Society collapses.

The authors are computer modelers, and in Limits to Growth they spend a lot of time getting to the scenarios they’ve built as they lay groundwork, obviously wanting readers to fully understand the basis for their computer models. They present 11 different models, each tweaked to fit changes in the overall picture of life on planet Earth.

They walk you through 11 scenarios, from worst- to best-case. In the first one, we’ve done nothing to strike a counterbalance and create a sustainable system for energy consumption and conservation. The result? We hit collapse sometime between 2000 and 2050. “Collapse” means a rather abrupt nosedive off a cliff as industrial output, life expectancy, and quality of life plummet, along with available food, services, and goods per person. Meanwhile, pollution skyrockets, exacerbating the decline.

In the next 10 scenarios, the authors make small tweaks for counterbalancing measures such as population controls, antipollution, agricultural sustainability and yield-increasing techniques, and other methods. Only in the last few scenarios, with early counterbalance interventions enacted, do we avoid collapse.

The worst-case scenario, unfortunately, is now playing out in real time. As Dennis Meadows states in the 2020 preface

I believe that society is nearing the decline portrayed in Scenario 1.

While the book’s darkest element is the tragically missed opportunity, the solutions offered by the authors remain strongly applicable, if not now in order to avoid collapse altogether, then to help us all prepare for it.

Despite the gloomy state of affairs, the authors seem to have been guided by optimism. They end the book with proposed solutions, and some of these take on a rather philosophical bent. The last section is titled “Loving,” in which they argue

The sustainability revolution will have to be, above all, a collective transformation that permits the best in human nature, rather than the worst, to be expressed and nurtured.

While I’m cheered by the idea that we could somehow marshal “the best in human nature,” it’s the authors’ tendency toward collectivism that sparks my only real critique of the book. Their counterbalancing measures tend to be socialistic, which would seem to require centralized, authoritarian directives. Perhaps aware of this critique from the original book’s publication, toward the end they claim

Some people who have thought about sustainability envision it as largely decentralized, with localities relying more on their local resources and less on international trade. They would set boundary conditions that keep each community from threatening the viability of the others or of the Earth as a whole. Cultural variety, autonomy, freedom, and self-determination could be greater, not less, in such a world.

This fits my own ideal for sustainability as well. I’ll give you an example that recently arose from our experience. Anthony and I tried to order flowers for a family member in Walla Walla, only to be told by the florist that they had no flowers due to “supply-chain issues.” Really? In all of the verdant Walla Walla Valley, there were no flowers to be had? That seems absurd, but apparently, the cut-flower business is incredibly global, as this piece by the Earthworm makes clear.

I’ll leave you with one parting thought: Compared to most of human history, we’ve for the past 100 years been living a life of incredible extravagance. The fact that this energy party is likely coming to a close does not actually have to mean the end of everything. Perhaps we can think of it as an opportunity—to get back in touch with nature, to learn to work more with our hands, to move toward growing our own food and living more lightly on an earth that can support us so well, when all of us simply use less of it.

After all, the average person today lives like a king of yesteryear.

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And Now the Giveaway Portion of This Post

At the end of the month, we’ll draw one email address from our paid subscriber list, and that reader will receive a free copy of Limits to Growth.

From the Chelsea Green website, on the groundbreaking publication of Limits to Growth:

"A pioneering work of science."—Business Insider

"[This book] helped launch modern environmental computer modeling and began our current globally focused environmental debate . . . . a scientifically rigorous and credible warning."—The Nation 

In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global ‘overshoot,’ or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella [sic] Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year [sic] Global Update.

Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognized for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.

Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.

In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.

Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development.