Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

by Donella H. Meadows

But rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way.

It would combine knowledge and regulation to “internalize the externalities” of the market system, so that the price of a product would reflect the full costs (including all environmental and social side effects) of making that product. This is a measure every economics textbook has called for (in vain) for decades. It would automatically guide investments and purchases, so people could make choices in the monetary realm that they would not later regret in the realm of real material or social worth.

As in nature, diversity in a human society would be both a cause of and a result of sustainability.

Some games that amuse and consume people today, such as arms races or the accumulation of unlimited wealth, would probably no longer be feasible, respected, or interesting. But there still would be games, challenges, problems to solve, ways for people to prove themselves, serve each other, test their abilities, and live good lives—perhaps more satisfying lives than any possible today.

Extend the planning horizon. Base the choice among current options much more on their long-term costs and benefits, not just the results they will produce in today’s market or tomorrow’s election. Develop the incentives, the tools, and the procedures required for the media, the market, and elections to report, respect, and be responsible for issues that unfold over decades. • Improve the signals. Learn more about and monitor both the real welfare of the human population and the real impact on the world ecosystem of human activity.6 Inform governments and the public as continuously and promptly about environmental and social conditions as about economic conditions.

Include environmental and social costs in economic prices; recast economic indicators such as the GDP, so that they do not confuse costs with benefits or throughput with welfare or the deterioration of natural capital with income.

Speed up response times. Look actively for signals that indicate when the environment or society is stressed. Decide in advance what to do if problems appear (if possible, forecast them before they appear) and have in place the institu...

Minimize the use of nonrenewable resources. Fossil fuels, fossil groundwaters, and minerals should be used only with the greatest possible efficiency, recycled when possible (fuels can’t be recycled, but minerals and water can), and consumed only as part of a deliberate transition to renewable resources.

Prevent the erosion of renewable resources. The productivity of soils, surface waters, rechargeable groundwaters, and all living things, including forests, fish, and game should be protected and, as far as possible, restored and enhanced. These resources should only be harvested at the rate at which they can regenerate themselves. That requires information about their regeneration rates and strong social sanctions or economic inducements against their overuse. • Use all resources with maximum efficiency. The more human welfare can be obtained within a given ecological footprint, the better the quality of life can be while remaining below the limits.

Slow and eventually stop exponential growth of population and physical capital. There are limits to the extent that the first six items on this list can be pursued. Therefore this last item is the most essential. It involves institutional and philosophical change and social innovation. It requires defining levels of population and industrial output that are desirable and sustainable. It calls for defining goals around the idea of development rather than growth. It asks, simply but profoundly, for a larger and more truly satisfying vision of the purpose of human existence than mere physical expansion and accumulation.

Growth as presently structured either is not solving these problems at all, or is solving them only slowly and inefficiently. Until more effective solutions are in sight, however, society will never let go of its addiction to growth, because people so badly need hope. Growth may be a false hope, but it is better than no hope at all.

Unemployment. Human beings need to work, to test and to discipline themselves, to take responsibility for fulfilling their own basic needs, to have the satisfaction of personal participation, and to be accepted as adult, responsible members of society. That need should be not be left unfulfilled, and it should not be filled by degrading or harmful work.

Unmet nonmaterial needs. People don’t need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don’t need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.

The necessity of taking the industrial world to its next stage of evolution is not a disaster—it is an amazing opportunity. How to seize the opportunity, how to bring into being a world that is not only sustainable, functional, and equitable but also deeply desirable is a question of leadership and ethics and vision and courage, properties not of computer models but of the human heart and soul.

First, information is the key to transformation. That does not necessarily mean more information, better statistics, bigger databases, or the World Wide Web, though all of these may play a part. It means relevant, compelling, select, powerful, timely, accurate information flowing in new ways to new recipients, carrying new content, suggesting new rules and goals (rules and goals that are themselves information).

Second, systems strongly resist changes in their information flows, especially in their rules and goals. It is not surprising that those who benefit from the current system actively oppose such revision. Entrenched political, economic, and religious cliques can constrain almost entirely the attempts of an individual or small group to operate by different rules or to attain goals different from those sanctioned by the system. Innovators can be ignored, marginalized, ridiculed, denied promotions or resources or public voices.

“Never deny the power of a small group of committed individuals to change the world. Indeed that is the only thing that ever has.”

We have learned the hard way that it is difficult to live a life of material moderation within a system that expects, exhorts, and rewards consumption.

It is not easy to use energy efficiently in an economy that produces energy-inefficient products.

Above all, it is difficult to put forth new information in a system that is structured to hear only old information.

What are the tools we approached so cautiously? They are: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving.

Vision without action is useless. But action without vision is directionless and feeble.

Work that dignifies people instead of demeaning them. Some way of providing incentives for people to give their best to society and to be rewarded for doing so, while ensuring that everyone will be provided for sufficiently under any circumstances.

Leaders who are honest, respectful, intelligent, humble, and more interested in doing their jobs than in keeping their jobs, more interested in serving society than in winning elections.

Technical design that reduces emissions and waste to a minimum, and social agreement not to produce emissions or waste that technology and nature can’t handle.

Media that reflect the world’s diversity and at the same time unite cultures with relevant, accurate, timely, unbiased, and intelligent information, presented in its historic and whole-system context.

Reasons for living and for thinking well of ourselves that do not involve the accumulation of material things.

Many untruths are deliberate, understood as such by both speaker and listeners. They are put forth to manipulate, lull, or entice, to postpone action, to justify self-serving action, to gain or preserve power, or to deny an uncomfortable reality.

It is the avarice and indifference of the rich that lock the poor into poverty. The poor need new attitudes among the rich; then there will be growth specifically geared to serve their needs.

The depths of human ignorance are much more profound than most of us are willing to admit.

If you cannot afford to lose, do not gamble.

The world’s leaders have lost both the habit of learning and the freedom to learn. Somehow a political system has evolved in which the voters expect leaders to have all the answers, that assigns only a few people to be leaders, and that brings them down quickly if they suggest unpleasant remedies.

The world’s leaders do not know any better than anyone else how to bring about a sustainable society; most of them don’t even know it’s necessary to do so. A sustainability revolution requires each person to act as a learning leader at some level, from family to community to nation to world. And it requires each of us to support leaders by allowing them to admit uncertainty, conduct honest experiments, and acknowledge mistakes.

Individualism and shortsightedness are the greatest problems of the current social system, we think, and the deepest cause of unsustainability.

The human ecological footprint in World3 is the sum of three components: the arable land used for crop production in agriculture; the urban land used for urban–industrial–transportation infrastructure; and the amount of absorption land required to neutralize the emission of pollutants, assumed to be proportional to the persistent pollution generation rate. All land areas are measured in billion (109) hectares.

The HEF is normalized to be 1 in 1970, and the resulting index varies from 0.5 in the year 1900, through 1.76 in year 2000, to highly unsustainable values above 3 for short periods in scenarios showing overshoot and collapse. In the most successful scenarios it proves possible to keep the HEF below 2 for most of the twenty-first century. The sustainable level of HEF is probably around 1.1, a level that was passed around 1980.