The pinnacle of this debate came in 1972 when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a runaway best-seller that used early computer models to predict that if natural systems continued to be depleted at their current rate, humanity would overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity by the middle of the twenty-first century. Saving a few beautiful mountain ranges wouldn’t be enough to get us out of this fix; the logic of growth itself needed to be confronted.
