Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

by Donella H. Meadows

The global challenge can be simply stated: To reach sustainability, humanity must increase the consumption levels of the world’s poor, while at the same time reducing humanity’s total ecological footprint. There must be technological advance, and personal change, and longer planning horizons. There must be greater respect, caring, and sharing across political boundaries. This will take decades to achieve even under the best of circumstances. No modern political party has garnered broad support for such a program, certainly not among the rich and powerful, who could make room for growth among the poor by reducing their own footprints.

Talked about how sustainibility can be achieved

Jorgen is the cynic. He believes that humanity will pursue short-term goals of increased consumption, employment, and financial security to the bitter end, ignoring the increasingly clear and strong signals until it is too late. He is sad to think that society will voluntarily forsake the wonderful world that could have been.

Dennis sits in between. He believes actions will ultimately be taken to avoid the worst possibilities for global collapse. He expects that the world will eventually choose a relatively sustainable future, but only after severe global crises force belated action.

And the results secured after long delay will be much less attractive than those that could have been at...

The decline in oil production within important nations, the thinning of stratospheric ozone, the mounting global temperature, the widespread persistence of hunger, the escalating debate over the location of disposal sites for toxic wastes, falling groundwater levels, disappearing species, and receding forests are just a few of the problems that have engendered major studies, international meetings, and global agreements.

We do not believe that available data and theories will ever permit accurate predictions of what will happen to the world over the coming century. But we do believe that current knowledge permits us to rule out a range of futures as unrealistic. Available facts already invalidate many people’s implicit expectations of sustained growth in the future—they are just wishful thinking, attractive but erroneous, expedient but ineffective.

One vivid example of global overshoot and collapse did actually take place around the turn of the millennium: the “dot.com bubble” in the global stock market. The bubble illustrates the dynamics of interest in this book, although in the world of finance and not in the world of physical resources. The erodible resource was investor confidence.

The three causes of overshoot are always the same, at any scale from personal to planetary. First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, beyond which the moving system may not safely go. Third, there is a delay or mistake in the perceptions and the responses that strive to keep the system within its limits. These three are necessary and sufficient to produce an overshoot.

Overshoot can lead to two different outcomes. One is a crash of some kind. Another is a deliberate turnaround, a correction, a careful easing down. We explore these two possibilities as they apply to human society and the planet that supports it. We believe that a correction is possible and that it could lead to a desirable, sustainable, sufficient future for all the world’s peoples. We also believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today.

Overshoot comes from the combination of (1) rapid change, (2) limits to that change, and (3) errors or delays in perceiving the limits and controlling the change.

Individuals support growth-oriented policies, because they believe growth will give them an ever increasing welfare. Governments seek growth as a remedy for just about every problem. In the rich world, growth is believed to be necessary for employment, upward mobility, and technical advance. In the poor world, growth seems to be the only way out of poverty. Many believe that growth is required to provide the resources necessary for protecting and improving the environment. Government and corporate leaders do all they can to produce more and more growth.

The physical limits to growth are limits to the ability of planetary sources to provide materials and energy and to the ability of planetary sinks to absorb the pollution and waste.

The good news is that current high rates of throughput are not necessary to support a decent standard of living for all the world’s people.

The changes and choices that will bring down the footprint are not being made, at least not fast enough to reduce the growing burden on the sources and sinks. They are not being made because there is no immediate pressure to make them, and because they take a long time to implement.

These changes, combined with the technical changes we assumed in chapter 6, make possible a sustainable simulated world population of about eight billion. Those eight billion people all achieve a level of well-being roughly equivalent to the lower-income nations of present-day Europe. Given reasonable assumptions about market efficiency and technical advance, the material and energy throughputs needed by that simulated world could be maintained by the planet indefinitely.

Blind pursuit of physical growth in a finite world ultimately makes most problems worse;

Of course you can’t fold a piece of cloth in half 33 times. But if you could, the bundle of cloth would be long enough to reach from Boston to Frankfurt—3,400 miles, about 5,400 kilometers.

You can see how exponential growth, combined with response delays, can lead to overshoot. For a long time the growth looks insignificant. There appears to be no problem. Then suddenly change comes on faster and faster, until, with the last doubling or two, there is no time to react.

Exponential growth occurs in two different ways. If an entity is self-reproducing, then its exponential growth is inherent. If an entity is driven by something else that is growing exponentially, then its growth is derived.

Growth in population and capital generates growth in the human ecological footprint unless or until there are profound changes in consumption preferences and drastic improvements in efficiencies of resource use.

We assume that industrialization reduces desired family size, over the long term and after a delay, by raising the cost of bringing up children and reducing their immediate economic benefits for their parents.

Our emphasis is on the physical economy, the real things to which the earth’s limits apply, not the money economy, which is a social invention not constrained by the physical laws of the planet.

Growth is necessary to end poverty. That seems obvious. Less obvious to its many proponents is the fact that growth in the economic system, as it is currently structured, will not end poverty. On the contrary, current modes of growth perpetuate poverty and increase the gap between the rich and the poor.

The richest 20 percent of the world’s population controls more than 80 percent of the world gross product and uses nearly 60 percent of world commercial energy.

systemically reward the privileged with the power and resources to acquire even more privilege.

In systems terms these structures are called “success to the successful” feedback loops.17 They are positive loops that reward the successful with the means to succeed.

This poverty-perpetuating structure arises from the fact that it’s easier for rich populations to save, invest, and multiply their capital than it is for poor ones to do so. Not only do the rich have greater power to control market conditions, purchase new technologies, and command resources, but centuries of growth have built up for them a large stock of capital that multiplies itself.

Low population growth permits more output to be allocated to achieving economic growth and less to meeting the health and education needs of a rapidly expanding populace.

In poor countries, by contrast, capital growth has a hard time keeping up with population growth.

Output that might be reinvested is more likely to be required to provide schools and hospitals and to fulfill subsistence consumption needs. Because immediate requirements leaves little output for ...

When women see no attractive educational or economic alternatives to childbearing, children are one of the few forms of investment available; thus the population grows bigger without growing richer. As the saying goes, “The rich get richer and the poor get children.”

“less success to the already unsuccessful”

By drawing output away from investment and into consumption, population growth slows capital growth.

Poverty, in turn, perpetuates population growth by keeping people in conditions where they have no education, no health care, no family planning, no choices, no power, no way to get ahead except to hope their...

A great agricultural achievement, a tremendous increase in food production, has been largely absorbed not in feeding people more adequately but in feeding more people inadequately.

The second tragedy is environmental. The increase in food production has been attained by policies that damaged soils, waters, forests, and ecosystems, a cost that will make future production increases more difficult.

More poverty means more population, which means more poverty. But less poverty means slower population growth, which means less poverty.

Population growth will essentially cease, either because the birth rates fall farther, or because deaths begin to rise—or both.

The technologies we adopted that enabled us to maintain constant or declining dollar costs for resources often required ever-increasing amounts of direct and indirect fuel . . . this luxury becomes a costly necessity, requiring that increasing proportions of our national income be diverted to the resource-processing sectors in order to supply the same quantity of resource. —WORLD COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, 1987

The definitions of resources, reserves, consumption, and production are inconsistent; the science is incomplete, and bureaucracies often distort or hide the numbers for their own political and economic ends.

Roughly nine million people die every year of causes related to hunger. That comes to an average of 25,000 deaths a day.

According to this study, if all cultivatable land were allocated to food, if there were no loss to erosion, if there were perfect weather, perfect management, and uninhibited use of agricultural inputs, the 117 countries studied could multiply their food output by a factor of 16.

Food production increases have come almost entirely from yield increases, not from a net expansion of land.

People are not hungry because there is too little food to buy; they are hungry because they cannot afford to buy food.

U.S. per capita water withdrawal may have declined, but it is still very high at 1,500 cubic meters per person per year. The average citizen of the developing world uses only one-third that much; the average sub-Saharan African, only one-tenth.

By 2025 as much as 2/3 of the world population would be under stress conditions.

North China overpumps its wells by 30 cubic kilometers a year (which is one reason the Yellow River is running dry).

One of the best ways to put these good practices into action is to stop subsidizing water. If water price began to incorporate even partially the full financial, social, and environmental cost of delivering that water, wiser use would become automatic.

A standing forest is a resource in itself, performing vital functions beyond economic measure. Forests moderate climate, control floods, and store water against drought.

The tropical forests alone, which cover only 7 percent of the earth’s surface, are believed to be the home of at least 50 percent of the earth’s species.