As author Christian Parenti observed recently of the book’s lasting influence, “Limits combined the glamour of Big Science—powerful MIT computers and support from the Smithsonian Institution—with a focus on the interconnectedness of things, which fit perfectly with the new countercultural zeitgeist.” And though some of the book’s projections have not held up over time—the authors underestimated, for instance, the capacity of profit incentives and innovative technologies to unlock new reserves of finite resources—Limits was right about the most important limit of all. On “the limits of natural
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