Five Tools for Going Forward

Paul Seabright

  • Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse; Envisioning a Sustainable Future by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers
    Earthscan, 320 pp, £19.95, May 1992, ISBN 0 85383 130 0

Twenty years after The Limits to Growth comes the sequel. It’s a hard act to follow: the original sold nine million copies and made its authors and backers, the so-called Club of Rome, famous with its prophecy that the comfortable optimism of the Sixties was threatened by a combination of population growth, resource exhaustion and the effluents produced by affluence. The authors used a large computer model to project economic and demographic trends, and predicted a collapse of living standards by the middle of the 21st century unless dramatic changes were made. A decade after the Cuba missile crisis, a world that was learning to live with the superpower confrontation reacted in alarm to the warning that a population explosion would be no less deadly than that of the ICBMs, and much harder to control. Some pessimists even derived a certain lugubrious pleasure from thinking the baby boom more inevitable and more damaging than the atomic kind. Demographic warfare differs from the traditional sort in that going nuclear usually signals de-escalation. But the authors warned that slowing the birth rate (did they choose the title Club of Rome deliberately?) would be nothing like enough to avoid calamity. At any foreseeable stable population level, even existing consumption trends would exhaust the world’s resources and pollute its environment beyond repair.

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[*] This is not strictly correct. It is theoretically possible for the rate at which output is produced from given resources to increase fast enough to offset for ever the declining levels of those resources. But to do so it would have to increase at an accelerating rate, and this model – like most sensible ones – assumes that the more efficiently a given resource is utilised, the harder it is to make further efficiency improvements.