The Problematique (Part 1)

This conference is our chance to stop this orgy of destruction. With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction. And ultimately, we are committing suicide by proxy.

That was the voice of Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres. Speaking in 2022, a scientist warned that thanks to global warming, habitat destruction and pollution, humanity is now on track to make our world unlivable this century. What many people do not know is that 50 years earlier, a group of young scientists predicted almost that exact fate.

Across the Charles River at MIT in Cambridge, a team of scientists built a global computer model to measure long-term trends. They found, and this is the core of their startling book, The Limits to Growth, that the way things are going now, the planet can support us for less than 100 years.

The study was commissioned by a well-heeled group of intellectuals called the Club of Rome.

You can very well tell by reading this book that it was the product of someone who wrote with clarity and skill, and I should like to recognize Dana Meadows as the author.

We said two things. One was that if we run into those limits, what will happen will be a collapse of our system, not necessarily the Earth system, but the industrial system.

That won’t take place at the same time around the world. It will be more or less severe in different societies, depending on what happens between now and then, on the level of industrialization. But in each case, it’s likely to be extremely traumatic.

And the second thing we said is we don’t have to do that, that there are ways to keep ourselves under those limits, and yet to meet all the material needs of the growing world populations.

-Secretary of HEW 1 Eliot Richardson.

-I believe all of us, all of us in the United States, and I think indeed every world citizen, are indebted to the Club of Rome. This study is too thoughtful, too thorough, too significant, and the consequences of ignoring its implications too disastrous, if we should be wrong in underestimating them.

-Maurice Strong, United Nations Undersecretary General, is the director of the upcoming World Conference on the Environment.

-In the case of the MIT Club of Rome project, they do point out the need for a redirection of many of man’s activities, in particular of the patterns of growth in the high-growth, high-technology, high-pollution societies.

-The esteemed economist, Professor Putnam.

-Well, I think that the conclusions of the study are completely wrong.

The most hostile group of professionals who have commented on the study have been the economists.

A study which has been denounced by almost every bona fide analyst in the western world.

We’ve got real things to worry about, but the much-poop-lod report of the Club of Rome is not one of them.

So why did we ignore The Limits to Growth?

My name is Katie Shields. I’m a researcher, policymaker and former economic consultant.

I came across the slim little 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, several years ago, when I decided to switch careers to dedicate my time to the unfolding climate and ecological crisis. The book was based on a two-year study sponsored by the Club of Rome, a think tank founded by a renowned Italian industrialist. It was conducted by an interdisciplinary team of young scientists working out of MIT. The team combined the latest scientific research with the very best computing technology of the era to construct a model of the world system and use it to simulate various future pathways for humanity.

Their conclusion? The most likely outcome was that our industrial civilization would collapse by around the middle of this, the 21st century. Unless that is, we radically altered our economic model from one that focused on endless growth and all the destruction that it entails to one that could allow humanity to thrive and prosper, perhaps indefinitely, and balance with the Earth’s natural limits.

Stunned by the book’s clear prose and profound foresight, I wanted to understand why humanity had failed to heed its warnings. When I learned how it had been the source of much controversy and that it was economists, my alma mater, who had been its greatest critics, I determined to find out why.

Together with Vegard Beyer, a communications strategist who at the time was researching the origins of the environmental movement, we embarked on an effort to uncover the true story of how The Limits to Growth came to burst into the public arena half a century ago, only for its young authors to be attacked by the powers that be.

As we dug through archives, interviewed former team members, and spoke with people close to the story and its many colourful characters, we sought to understand what we can learn from their legacy, now that scientists say we have indeed reached The Limits to Growth, and must radically chart a new course for humanity if we are to avoid the fate those young scientists foretold.

In the course of our research, a particularly fortuitous find was an account of how The Limits to Growth came to be, written by the book’s author, Donella Meadows, or Dana, to friends. A biophysicist from Harvard, Dana was also a lead researcher on the MIT team. Her colleagues described her as the heart of the project, to its head and Dana’s husband, Dennis Meadows.

Though rather media shy at the time, Dana went on to become a core figure in the environmental movement. Often referred to as the mother of systems thinking, she was a pioneering educator and writer, whose work is now inspiring a new generation of interdisciplinary thinkers, striving to build an economic system that can meet the needs of all beings within the means of the planet.

Dana intended her account to become a chapter in one of her later books, but it never reached publication. Dana Meadows died unexpectedly on February 20th, 2001, too soon to see her early work vindicated, or to learn just quite what a legacy she would have.

This three-part podcast is about the most important book you’ve probably never read.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is the summer of 1969, and 28-year-old Donella Hager, Dana, to friends, is preparing to graduate. A self-professed child of the Sputnik age, Dana was on track for an illustrious career in science. She already held a chemistry degree cum laude from the esteemed Carleton College and was about to become a doctor in biophysics at Harvard. Not only that, but she’d won one of the Ivy League College’s coveted fellowships, which she intended to take up just as soon as she returned from her honeymoon.

Dana’s fiancee, college sweetheart, Dennis Meadows, was also preparing to graduate that summer. After college, he had gone to DC to work at the Atomic Energy Commission, but the move had made him decide that he didn’t want to be a chemist anymore, so he had relocated to Boston to be closer to Dana and found his calling at the pioneering Computer Science Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That summer, as NASA astronauts readied their spacecraft for the moon and artists and musicians prepared to descend upon Woodstock, Dana and Dennis, with two newly minted PhDs, completed their nuptials, sold their car and bought two plane tickets to England. As Dana recalled, “We were out for adventure, we intended to drive to India and back, climbing mountains and kayaking wild rivers along the way.”

They were setting out for a year-long trek along what was commonly known as the hippie trail, traversing overland through Europe and on into Western and Southern Asia. They drove and slept in their rusty Land Rover, or camped out in deserts, jungles, mountains and villages. As Dana recalled, “We were often received with hospitality beyond belief, extended with dignity and grace by the poorest people we had ever encountered.”

Yet her years of academic training could not prepare Dana for what was to be a life-changing experience for this idealistic young couple from the American Midwest.

“I started the trip a technological optimist,” she later wrote. “I thought science could solve all problems. We didn’t have to drive far into East Asia to run into problems that my training couldn’t solve. For the first time in our lives, we were face-to-face with malnourished children and kids with open sores of smallpox. We saw galloping soil erosion and sewage running in open drains along streets. We began to wonder about the causes and consequences of poverty. As the Land Rover pounds painfully over miles of dusty desert, we tried to make sense of what we were seeing.”

What they were seeing was already familiar to Aurelio Peccei. This charismatic, tanned, silver-haired Italian industrialist was quite simply on a mission to save the world.

The couple had not yet heard of him as they finally made their way onto what we now call Sri Lanka, but that was about to change. Born in Turin, Italy in 1908, the young Aurelio was an adventurous polyglot. He had studied in Paris and Russia and was busy setting up the first Fiat motoring factory in China when war brought him back to Italy. He joined the resistance, was captured and present and endured torture by the Nazis for almost a year before his comrades aided his escape.

When the war ended, Aurelio helped rebuild Italy as the powerhouse of Europe, going on to head several of its major corporations. But as Aurelio would later write, his time in captivity, living and surviving alongside men with nothing but their own convictions and humanity, impacted him profoundly.

“It is perhaps from the experiences of that period,” he wrote, “that I began to be convinced that latent in man is a great force for good, which awaits liberation, and that modern society has yet to discover the way of liberating it.”

In the following decades, as Aurelio travelled the world as one of its leading industrialists, he became increasingly concerned about modern society’s rising tide of problems, and despite his earlier hopes, man’s seeming inability to tackle them.

In 1968, a year before Dana and Dennis Meadows set out on their trip to Asia, he gathered in Rome some of his most distinguished friends, businessmen, scientists, political advisers from around the world, to discuss what he called the Problematique: A complex nest of continuous critical problems, such as poverty, inequality, racism, crime, war, pollution and resource depletion.

To Aurelio, they were symptoms of an increasingly connected, growing and industrialising world economy, and they could not be solved by national governments working in isolation.

Today, for the first time in human history, there is one mankind, not scattered civilisations in their own environments, with their own faith, but a vast humankind which will have to decide all together where we want to go.

Aurelio’s passion, charisma and deep concern for humanity helped convince the 30 or so men he had gathered to form a loose think tank, which they named the Club of Rome. After that meeting, they agreed to reconvene within two years with a plan for tackling the problems.

And so, as Dana and Dennis were making their way back to Europe in June 1970, the Club of Rome assembled once again, this time in Bern, Switzerland, to discuss what to do about The Problematique.

The Swiss personalities, they were bankers and so on, didn’t understand what they wanted to do.

The original members were joined by some of the world’s most distinguished scientists and economists. Yet after hours of talks, they discovered that not one could deal with the problems in a connected way, except perhaps for one.

There was a tension, nobody knows what will happen, and beside me was sitting Jay Forrester.

Born in Nebraska in 1918, Jay Forrester showed a genius from invention at a young age.

Well, I spent my youth on a cattle ranch. Every winter, the state of Nebraska would send a big wooden box of books to each country school, and they would have ones on electrical experiments. And by the time I was a senior in high school, I built a wind-driven electric generator that was the first electricity that we’d had on the ranch.

Jay would go on to study at MIT, where he designed feedback control systems for the naval ships used in Pearl Harbor. Later, he developed flight simulators, created the first-ever computer animation, and invented random access memory, which helped usher in an era of powerful modern computing.

But it would be for what he did with that computing power that he’ll be most remembered for, and what would eventually lead him to become involved with the Club of Rome.

In the early 1950s, Jay had been working as a consultant to General Electric in its engineering department, when its management team approached him to help solve a different problem related to its boom and bust performance.

We found that if you’d take the policies that they were following, and do a hand simulation on a notebook page of what would happen week by week, that you in fact had a highly unstable system.

Jay used his expertise in building feedback control systems to create a map of all the elements in General Electric’s business, such as inventories, workers, overheads, and so on, and show how they were all dynamically connected over time, so that the company could spot pressure points and prevent them becoming problems.

Working in MIT’s cutting-edge mainframe computer labs, he then translated his sketches of General Electric’s business into computer code, creating a new programming language to help simulate and test different management policies.

He called this new branch of science Industrial Dynamics. The strategy worked, and soon Jay was conducting seminars at MIT Sloan’s Management School for the cream of American industry.

Later, a chance encounter with the mayor of Boston led him to apply this new approach to cities.

In the late 1960s, John Collins came to MIT and by chance took an office next to mine.

I said to him, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we would combine the background that we’ve had in the corporation with the knowledge of people like yourself in cities and see if we could come to any better understanding?”

Boston, like many cities in the 1960s, was suffering from a rise of poverty and racial inequality. Just as he had done for US corporations, Jay created a map of all the important elements of the city of Boston and how they influenced the well-being of its citizens.

As in physics, Jay liked to say that every action provokes a reaction elsewhere in the system, or, to use the engineering term, “feedback”. Often, policymakers take an action they think will solve a problem, say, building more roads to alleviate traffic, but in so doing, they make the problem worse by inducing more cars into the city. Jay called this the “counter-intuitive nature of complex systems”.

One of Jay’s more counter-intuitive findings for Boston was that creating neighborhoods of cheap housing would actually serve to entrench its inequality problems further, leading to the development of slums. His resulting book, Urban Dynamics, came to be used by city planners around the world and would later inspire the computer game, SimCity.

Fellow MIT professor, Caroll Wilson, who happened to be a member of the Club of Rome, thought Jay’s pioneering work on modeling complex systems sounded like it could help solve Aurelio’s Problematique, so he invited Jay to accompany him to Bern that summer.

And so, on that warm June evening in Switzerland, as Jay listened to the increasingly fraught discussions among the Club of Rome members, he took his knowledge of modeling the dynamics of industries and cities, and sketched out the first ever world model right there on a set of Swiss napkins.

And I told them they could come to MIT and learn more about this, but they would have to come for two weeks or not at all, because I knew that it would take two weeks for them to really understand. And they agreed. They agreed there at midnight that evening that they would come, they would come three weeks from that day.

Jay touched down in Boston at almost the exact same time as Dana and Dennis were returning from their trip to Asia. For a whole year, the couple had been cut off from events in their home country, living out of the back of a Land Rover with nothing but a few items of clothing, some cooking utensils, and a teapot for showering. It took some adjusting.

“We returned that summer to a country that had just bombed Cambodia secretly, and shot its own students at Kent State,” recalled Dana. “We were appalled at the violence and the divisive politics. When we went back to visit our middle-class families, we couldn’t imagine why the people in our home towns needed so much stuff. Even though they didn’t have smallpox and their babies didn’t die from hunger, our families and childhood neighbours seemed to be so manifestly dissatisfied. They were not noticeably happier than the villagers with whom we had spent the last year. We were still reeling from the culture shock when the Club of Rome arrived at MIT.”

Jay Forrester had promised to teach the Club of Rome all about what he called ‘systems dynamics’. Now he needed help from his small department’s best computer scientists to demonstrate their work in action. That scientist was, of course, Dana’s new husband, Dennis Meadows.

Dennis had barely started unpacking when he was hastily recalled to MIT. With a few weeks yet before Harvard would open its doors, Dana decided to accompany him, initially planning on listening to what sounded simply like an intriguing seminar.

Jay had transcribed the model that he had started on those Swiss napkins in Bern, onto a bedsheet and strung it across an entire wall in the lab. He now proceeded to present to Aurelio and the executive members of the Club of Rome his model of the world system.

It comprised five core elements – population, food, industry, resources and pollution. And a host of others that interacted with these and each other like education, healthcare, investment and technology.

By drawing a series of lines and connectors, Jay showed how changes on one part of the system might impact the rest. Say, for example, to address hunger, one might use technologies and fertilisers to raise food production, but this would also require more energy and create pollution which could later harm human health.

Jay put forward that it was only with this complete understanding of the system that one could hope to solve the Problematique.

After two packed weeks of seminars, the Club of Rome was finally satisfied. They offered Jay 2 million Deutschmarks 2 around a quarter of a million dollars donated by the Volkswagen Foundation.

It would be enough to kit out an entirely new lab dedicated to systems dynamics with the latest and most powerful mainframe computers and hire over a dozen scientists.

But there was a catch. Aurelio, who is now a grandfather, wanted results quickly within just one year. After that, the Club of Rome intended to set up a permanent think tank in Switzerland to create policy recommendations for the world’s governments and help them to implement them.

For reasons that Jay never made clear but were likely influenced by the prospect of the work moving full time to Switzerland, he declined Aurelio’s generous offer to lead the project.

Dennis had spent a year bearing witness to the problems the Club of Rome wanted to address and with Dana, many of long nights camped out under the stars contemplating what was causing them.

He went home that evening and wrote a proposal. He would use Jay’s prototype to show what would happen if current trends continued and create and test alternative scenarios that could help find solutions to mankind’s interconnected problems.

As he discussed his ideas with Dana, she too felt a desire to help the people and communities they had met in Asia, as well as deal with the mounting problems she was now waking up to at home. She decided there and then to give up her hard-earned Harvard Fellowship to help Dennis work on the project. And though her skills would prove valuable in ways she could not yet imagine to avoid any accusation of nepotism, she insisted on joining the project without pay.

Although he was just 28 years old at the time, the Club of Rome accepted Dennis’s proposal. Now he and Dana found themselves conducting the first major attempt to model the world system. Jay Forrester had provided the basic structure, their job was to test it and track down the best numbers to create scenarios.

When Jay Forrester built his first urban model of Boston, he had insisted on meeting one day per week every week with people with knowledge of the different challenges the city faced. Until he was satisfied, he had sufficiently understood the unique complexities and dynamics of the city.

The MIT team under Dennis’s leadership now embarked on a similar endeavour, not for a city of course, but the entire world. They had to understand how each problem fit within the broader system. Over the following months they met with leading geologists, agronomists, chemists, physicists, ecologists, demographers, economists.

They studied soil erosion, ozone layer depletion, chemical pollution, acid rain, infant mortality, poverty, malnutrition. They learned about the Earth’s mineral deposits and fossil fuel reserves and the energy required to extract them. And they studied the prospects for alternative energy sources like hydrogen, nuclear fusion and solar power.

They met with various experts from the likes of the United Nations Population Division, the World Bank, the National Academy of Sciences and the newly formed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose scientists presented new and worrying evidence about increasing carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and how they might lead to dangerous global warming.

Once, a visitor from McGill University secretly pilfered a confidential printout of their model, an oversight that would come back to bite them.

The team then set about using their data to build their world model. An important feature of the world’s system is that it is finite. There is a finite amount of land, of mineral deposits and of basic elements like oxygen, which we humans and other species depend on.

The Kaibab Plateau in Arizona is one such system. An elevated area bounded by steep cliff drops on all sides, it is almost impossible for land animals to migrate in or out unaided. Until the late 1800s, the Kaibab was a thriving balanced ecosystem consisting of deer and natural predators such as wolves and coyotes.

That is until cattle ranchers moved in, leading to a drop in native deer numbers. In an attempt to protect the deer, the government allowed hunters to kill the native predators.

In systems dynamics, as in physics, every action provokes a reaction. Jay Forrester referred to this as feedback. Negative feedbacks balance or counteract the forces driving a system, while positive ones reinforce them.

Here is Dana using the language of systems dynamics to explain what happens when the predators are removed.

The predation rate is part of the negative feedback loop. By the time the predator population comes down to zero, the balance between the positive feedback and the negative feedback is destroyed and starts generating an exponentially growing deer population. As the food gets depleted, it takes longer and longer for it to regenerate. What happens is it drags the deer population down with it.

In other words, the removal of predators, instead of protecting the deer, had the exact opposite effect. It allowed the deer to multiply to such an extent that they eroded their own habitat.

And the deer population finally falls fast enough and far enough to the point where it can be again balanced by the food regeneration rate. Both of them are very, very much lower than they had been before.

The Kaibab is an example of what happens when we reach the limits of a finite system. As Dana would later write, when growth is exponential, limits are reached surprisingly quickly.The most common pattern is one of overshoot beyond the carrying capacity of the environment, followed by collapse.

The MIT team’s research indicated that in the post-war era, and particularly in the United States, various indicators of human activity were also growing exponentially.

From a historical perspective, the growth we’ve witnessed over the last 100 years are absolutely atypical. The global population is doubling every 33 years. Resource consumption is doubling every 20 years.

The MIT team had realised that in order to determine whether humanity could solve Aurelio Peccei’s Problematique, the nest of problems of hunger, disease, poverty, conflict and so on, it would only be possible if humanity could also stay within the planet’s carrying capacity. The physical limits necessary for sustaining human life.

But while exponential growth in population and consumption looked to be depleting natural resources at a growing pace, it wasn’t clear that those trends alone need cause concern. After all, thanks to the so-called Green Revolution, which had created a new generation of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, agricultural yields were still rising, even as more and more land was being gobbled up to make way for suburbs, shopping malls, roads and farms. And though the population was still growing fast, its rate had started to slow from the heady heights of the post-war years.

But there was another problem to contend with: Pollution.

This new insect destroyer contains a lot of DDT, not just a little. The most effective weapon man has ever wielded against insects.

Biologist Rachel Carson began studying the effects of the powerful pesticide DDT when it first came into widespread use in the 1940s. The Nixon administration finally banned the pollutant in 1970. The same year he established the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act.

The EPA had not arrived from thin air either, but from a growing environmental movement. The first Earth Day also took place in 1970, and calls to stop destroying nature and clean up America’s air, water and landfills were growing.

So if the US, by far the world’s largest economy in the 1970s, was already clamping down on pollution, was there cause for the team to be worried? Well, for one thing, the stocks of even banned pollutants were still rising, since many, like DDT, accumulate in the environment, often for decades or longer.

In most cases where we have data, pollution is also growing exponentially. Lead has been accumulating in the Greenland ice caps exponentially. Fresh water pollution seems to be going up.

Not only that, but it had taken Rachel Carson two decades to prove DDT was harmful to human health, and around another decade for Congress to enact a ban, no thanks to lobbying by chemical companies. The thinny nose-own layer, acid rain, global warming, there were a host of other pollutants and problems the team was only just discovering, and possibly many more going unnoticed.

So if bans alone couldn’t prevent pollution rising, perhaps technologies could be deployed to clean them up. After all, America had just put a man on the moon. Well, despite what critics may later claim, the team did indeed account for rising technological progress. Here is Dennis Meadows explaining their approach to technology in the world model.

Our project is absolutely not anti-technological. Most of us are in fact rightly to be called technologists. One important question is, will further industrial growth permit us to clean up our environments? Certainly that growth will generate more money for pollution abatement procedures, but will also create more pollution. As agricultural capital increases, food production increases, however, industrial output also causes pollution. Pollution decreases food output and may also have adverse effects on mortality. We can think of technology which abates pollution, but it’s likely to be energy and capital intensive, making our resource problems more difficult. Certainly the approaches, the technical approaches to increasing food have exacerbated our environmental situation.

In short, the team found that technology could solve some problems, but it may well cause others. As had been the case with the Green Revolution, and as industry expands, so does the amount of resources used, as well as both the volume and the number of new pollutants. In a growing economy, relying on technology alone was not a surefire way to keep humanity within the planet’s limits, and might even push us closer to them.

So what were the chances of solving the Problematique under the prevailing industrial model of the 1970s? The team was about to find out.

Some months after they started their work, they produced what came to be known as the standard run. In that scenario, industry and population continued to grow, based on the dynamics of the 1960s and early 70s. For the first few decades, expansion was rapid, and the global economy, and with it, pollution ballooned.

If we run into those limits, what will happen will be a collapse of our system, not necessarily the Earth system, but the industrial system.

Now, you may expect the team to have been alarmed by this finding. After all, it meant a child born in the year 1970 could live to see the breakdown of modern civilisation. But as physicist Jørgen Randers, just 25 when he worked on the project explained:

So the team set about figuring out what that advice could look like. Though today’s computer processors could no doubt allow infinite simulations of such models, at the time this was a massive endeavour.

The team simulated 10 new scenarios, one with unlimited mineral resources, another with faster rates of technological progress, in a third, a complete switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy and so on. In most scenarios humanity flourished initially as the economy expanded, incomes rose and nutrition and health improved.

But even where the population eventually stabilised, exponential growth and consumption caused humanity to use up more and more natural resources to produce more pollution or waste at rates too fast for the Earth to absorb them and regenerate. This eventually caused humanity to overshoot the Earth’s capacity and, like the Kaibab deer, to suddenly collapse. In each scenario collapse came within 50 to 100 years.

Dana later recalled in her memoir how Jay Forrester had once explained to her why this was bound to happen, why humans simply can’t keep pushing back all limits, like those on resources or pollution, all at once while still trying to grow the human economy indefinitely on what was essentially a finite planet.

Making the system bigger and more complex simply creates new and often more wicked problems, making it impossible to solve the problem at stake.

It’s growth, Dana concluded. The problem is how to control and stabilise growth before the system hits the limits. Our solution, she realised, must be to choose our own limits or let nature choose them for us.

So the team tried a final scenario. They investigated how much land, resources and income would be needed to afford everyone around the world with sufficient food, water and necessities for a good life and tested ways to provision this without surpassing the Earth’s limits. Solutions like renewable energy and efficiency technologies, organic agricultural techniques and regulations to ensure products last longer and can be easily recycled. They also made provisions for investments in education and family planning and changes in how people live, work and travel to help protect nature, reduce land use and curb urban sprawl. This time they ran a scenario with limits to growth.

The solution worked. Still the team found that it would take some decades to reach a so-called equilibrium society, one in balance with the Earth’s carrying capacity. Because of the natural delays in making changes to our industrial processes, our policies and laws, our cultures and traditions, the sooner we started on that path, the better our chances of success.

This didn’t mean that some things couldn’t continue to grow without the problems of economic growth.

Dana and the team envisaged that people would be free to focus on more fulfilling activities that did not put too much pressure on the Earth. Activities like science or sports and culture.

It was a marked departure from the American dream of the 1950s, but by the late 60s awareness of mankind’s impact on our Earth was growing and a counter-cultural revolution was taking place.

Indeed, when Dana was later asked about what gives her hope about this proposal, she said

I’m very hopeful in this country that the mechanisms do exist for this kind of cultural change. In fact, I think it’s already happening. I think we’re one step, one contribution to a change which is indeed taking place, largely among young people who are trying many experiments. Some of which may turn out to be very useful in an equilibrium society. And I think the thing that encourages me, I work in the university with some of these young people, is that they are discovering that the alternate lifestyles that they are trying are not sacrifices and they’re not unpleasant. And in many ways they are more satisfying and their lives are more fulfilling than they would have been if they followed the pattern which we have come to regard as the cultural pattern of America. And it’s this which gives me great hope. I don’t think we’re calling for a great sacrifice. I only think we’re calling for a slightly different way of looking at things, which could in fact lead to many benefits.

Nonetheless, their proposal had profound implications. If the economy were to eventually stop growing, it would mean future income and technologies would need to be redistributed more fairly within and across countries, starting with the richest nation, the United States.

Just how that may be achieved, how America and other rich nations could be convinced to follow such a path, that, the team thought, was a job for the Club of Rome.

“It is our conclusion that the overwhelming task for the Club of Rome is to identify and implement that set of policies which will permit us to negotiate an orderly transition to a stable world.” It was with these words that Dennis ended his presentation of the MIT team’s main findings at the annual gathering of the Club of Rome in Montebello, Canada in the spring of 1971.

Just weeks before their deadline, he, Dana and the team had made the journey north to personally deliver their paradigm-changing solution to mankind’s predicaments. But the reception wasn’t quite what they had hoped for.

Maybe We Did Want to Save the World (Part 2)

On April 4th 1971, nine months after they had begun their work to solve Aurelio Peccei’s Problematique, Dana and Dennis Meadows and their fellow MIT teammates arrived at the exclusive Seigniory Club on the banks of the Ottawa river in Montebello, Canada to present their preliminary findings.

This was the first time all of the 50 or so international members of the Club of Rome had assembled together since their meeting the previous year in Bern. Jay Forrester too had made room in his schedule for the trip.

The MIT team had packed with them cases full of documents detailing all their research into mankind’s interconnected problems. Poverty, health, nutrition, land use, resource depletion, pollution. They included detailed printouts of the various scenarios produced by their high-tech mainframe computer and lists of all the many scientists and experts they had met with to exchange knowledge and gain feedback on their results.

As Dennis would state at that closed-door meeting, every expert they had spoken with so far, except perhaps for some economists, tended to agree with their findings. Indeed, some were even more pessimistic about mankind’s ability to change trajectory and achieve a “sustainable equilibrium society” than the young scientists from MIT.

According to Dana’s diary of that day, after many technical presentations by their team, Jay Forrester made his own remarks to the assembled members of the Club of Rome. He supported the team’s findings and emphasised that in order to solve the Problematique, the Club of Rome must convince governments to accept limits to growth before Earth imposed its own limits on us.

“I waited breathlessly for the distinguished members of the Club of Rome to take up this challenge and think through its political and social implications,” wrote Dana. “The Club members listened politely, spoke kind words,” recalled Dana, “and went back to the discussion of the world’s problems as if each was unrelated to all the others and as if there were no limits.”

As they took upon each problem, they called on growth to solve it. Energy shortages? We need more oil discoveries, more nuclear power! Poverty? More economic growth! Hunger? More food production! Urban slums? More housing! Pollution? More economic growth so we can afford pollution control!

Jay Forrester liked to say “the members were proposing simple solutions to complex problems, not realising that on a finite planet the solution to one problem may be the trigger of another.”

That was when Dana first realised that the problem was not recognising the Earth’s limits, but as she later wrote, the ideology of endless growth itself as a solution to postponing limits more or less indefinitely.

Back at MIT the next day, our frustrated team met, recalled Dana. “They didn’t get it,” we said. At stake was not just the legacy of their work, but to Dana, the future of humanity. As she later wrote, “Part of me was still in the villages of India and in the deserts and the remnants of forests and the choking cities. “I was trying to ensure that the future would be decent for the people there and people everywhere. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what was wrong with that.”

Their contract with the Club of Rome called for a book based on their model. They had been working on a technical report, as Dana put it, documenting every equation in the meticulous format that Jay Forester drummed into his students.

But that failure to convince the Club of Rome meant the end of that project. It meant there would be no new institute for them in Switzerland to develop the policy recommendations they hoped the Club of Rome’s A-list members would take to world governments.

Dana was not giving up. She was not only a hotshot scientist, but a talented writer. During her travels, she had filled six journals with short stories and musings on her adventures. She decided to write a report to the Club of Rome, not the technical report, but, as she put it, a staple in the upper corner essay, reinforcing their findings.

“We thought that clarity and perhaps some repetition were all that would be needed,” she recalled. “We didn’t understand that what we’d witnessed would be an example of what we would encounter all over the world. The inability of people to hear a message that questions one of their deepest assumptions. The responses that came back were a foreshadowing of what the world’s reaction would be,” wrote Dana.

Some members of the Club were elated.

That was Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome and at the time director of the organization for economic cooperation and development.

Yet other members of the Club were horrified. One of the most negative reactions came from British economist Jeremy Bray. He called their work naive and complained that technology had not been given the treatment it deserved. “I do not think minor emendations would put the report into a form in which I could agree with the conclusions,” he wrote.

But what struck Dana most was that nearly all members of the Club of Rome assumed that the report was not to them but to the world. “They began to visualize how the world would react,” she wrote, when it was released with their imprimatur.

Dana had set out simply to distill the essence of the complex body of work she and her team members had tried but failed to convey in Montebello, hoping that with some clarity and repetition, as she put it, she could change their minds. But she now found herself engaged in an intellectual battle with these men of the world, some of whom saw their report as a means to finally corral world leaders into action. Others, who feared the Club’s elite reputation was about to be ruined by the work of these idealistic young scientists.

“On my desk their comments piled up,” recalled Dana, “and I frantically tried to respond to them in further drafts.”

Dana’s report grew to the length of a short paperback, though some, like Bray, could not be satisfied with the changes. Aurelio Peccei was sold.

It is so obvious in a way, so simple to consider that we cannot continually and exponentially grow as we are doing now, nothing in the world, nothing in life, grows continuously.

According to Dana, as far as he was concerned, this report -not the technical report, nor any second phase in Switzerland- this was what he’d been waiting for.

The following summer, the United Nations was planning its first ever conference on the environment in Stockholm. Every world leader would be there, and Aurelio wanted this report in their hands.

Dana later wrote how Aurelio had said on one of his urgent phone calls from Rome or New York or Buenos Aires that he wanted 5,000 copies quickly, and he wanted Dana and Dennis to organise publication. Now, the rush to publish a non-peer-reviewed report may have sounded rather risky, but a chance to get their findings in the hands of decision makers in Stockholm was not something they could easily ignore.

The conference was still one year away, and their 400-page technical report was more or less complete. They envisaged Dana’s little book wouldn’t be published until long after the academic tome had received the rubber stamp of peer review. Even Aurelio’s insistence that it be published as a report too, and not by, the Club of Rome, did not cause them to rethink.

Several months before they had presented to the Club of Rome in Canada, Dennis had taken a research trip to Washington to a conference organised by Lester Brown, founder of the Overseas Development Council, who would later become a renowned figure in the environmental movement.

At dinner that evening, Dennis found himself sat next to the charming, keen-witted Washington publisher, Donald R. Lesh. There’s not a lot about Don’s backstory in the public domain, possibly because he was a spy. Only a few years older than Dana, Don Lesh, had been working at the US Embassy in Moscow in the late 60s when he was expelled on espionage charges.

In 1970 he would come to sit on Nixon’s National Security Council, before resigning just months later in protest at the US invasion of Cambodia. The same invasion that Dana had been disgusted to learn of on her return home from India.

With partner Bill Watts, also a former spy, Don had formed Potomac Associates, whose stated goal was to conduct “non-partisan research to heighten public understanding on significant contemporary problems of national and international significance.” However, it’s debatable as to how bipartisan they were able to be. Their names later turned up on Nixon’s infamous Enemies List.

When Aurelio said he needed a book and fast, Dennis gave Don a call. He loved it. “We were deeply impressed by the significance of the study and the remarkable clarity of exposition for such an intrinsically complex piece of research,” he wrote.

In November 1971, Dennis signed a contract with Potomac. Publication in the normal fashion for Potomac Associates meant three copies for selected policymakers, Dana recalled.

She had presumed Aurelio’s 5,000 copies would mainly be sent to government administrators. Until she got a phone call from Don Lesh telling her that her book would be sent to the heads of states of all nations, all members of European parliaments and the US Congress, all United States governors, all ambassadors to Washington and to the United Nations and key journalists around the world.

“I almost dropped the phone,” she recalled. From that moment on, wrote Dana in her memoir, Aurelio called, pejoled, arranged, suggested, pushed, persuaded. Until six months later, The Limits to Growth was published in the glare of international attention. Aurelio stirred up much of that attention. Potomac Associates stirred up the rest.

There was one problem. Their technical report had yet to make it through peer review. In their excitement about Dana’s book, the MIT team had underestimated the time it would take to find academics who could decipher the novel science of systems dynamics. But Aurelio, Don and Potomac Associates had already set the wheels in motion.

By spring 1972, Dana’s book was ready to hit the shelves. In view of a technical report, Dennis agreed to present their findings at a small gathering of scientists in Washington.

At least that’s what Don Leish had told him. But the well-connected former spook had somewhat bigger plans.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me say how very pleased we are to welcome our distinguished guests here today. This is the first full dress US presentation of an 18-month study of global limits to growth by an international team of 17 scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the direction of Dr. Dennis L. Meadows.

“We must have looked absurdly young.” Dana recalled of that day, on March 2nd, 1972, when she and Dennis and their MIT teammates took to the podium of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. In the audience were some 250 congressmen, senators, ambassadors, industrialists, and of course scientists, plus several radio and television news crew.

Let me introduce now Dr. Dennis Meadows, a member of the MIT faculty and Assistant Professor of Management and System Dynamics. Dennis.

Well, good morning. During the last year, a group of us at MIT, the principal members of which are with me here today, have been looking at the exponential growth of our global social and economic system. We’ve been attempting to understand what causes population and capital growth over the long term and where they may be leading us. We’ve been led on the basis of this work to five basic conclusions.

There are physical limits to growth which, given current trends, are very likely to be encountered even during the lifetime of our children.

Second, the most likely outcome of running into these limits if we continue to ignore them and instead base our short-term policies on the assumption of continued growth is that we’ll overshoot those limits and collapse, that there will be an uncontrolled decline both in population and industrial capacity. That won’t take place at the same time around the world. It will certainly take different forms. It will be more or less severe in different societies depending on what happens between now and then and on the level of industrialization, but in each case it’s likely to be extremely traumatic.

The third conclusion is that we appear to have a viable alternative to this outcome, one in which population and material production could be brought into balance with a finite environment and with our resources.

The fourth conclusion is that it’s realistically going to take a period of 50 years – 100 years or more, to reach that alternative in an orderly fashion.

And finally, and I think this is extremely important, every year we delay beginning to form our goals and moving towards them makes an orderly transition to this stable situation much more difficult and it decreases our ultimate options.

The first to react to Dennis’s presentation was Elliot Richardson, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and one of President Nixon’s closest members of cabinet.

The team could hardly have hoped for a better endorsement and these were not just empty words. Shortly after the conference, his office announced a public inquiry into limits to growth in the United States.

It seemed like their gamble to publish the book had paid off. All the late nights and weekends doing research in the lab, Dana’s months of endless writing and rewriting to convince the elite members of the Club of Rome, or at least some of them, that what they had to say was not stupid and naive, but profound and urgent.

Aurelio’s pulling in of every connection to every leader he had ever made in his decades of doing business around the world.

And finally, the ex-spy Don Leish’s slick propaganda campaign that had brought the great and good of politics, industry, science and media to Washington that day.

The richest country in the world was considering shifting its goal from undifferentiated economic growth to ensuring first and foremost that its population would have the means for long-term prosperity in a stable and healthy environment.

The only question now was, how would the world outside react?

Across the Charles River at MIT in Cambridge, a team of scientists tackled a problem. They built a global computer model on paper to measure long-term trends. They found, and this is the core of their startling book, The Limits to Growth, that the way things are going now, the planet can support us for less than 100 years. It may be nearer 50. This is Edward P. Morgan, ABC News, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thanks to Don’s extensive PR efforts, the team made that evening’s primetime news. And the next day, many of the leading titles had their stories splashed across the front pages.

MANKIND WARNED TO CURB GROWTH OR FACE CATASTROPHE, ran one headline. WILL GROWTH KILL HUMANITY?, TO GROW AND TO DIE, PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM, FAREWELL TO CIVILIZATION.

Would anyone hear the awful truth? With few exceptions, most had gone for the apocalyptic headline, with hardly any taking the time to read or report on their solution for an equilibrium world.

It was as Club of Rome member Jeremy Bray had warned: They were being branded as doom-sayers.

“Systemic sensationalizing and trivializing” is how Dana would later describe much of the media reaction. The next morning, the team got up early to watch Dennis appear on the Today Show. “First, a dog food commercial. Then, three minutes as Professor Dennis Meadows tells about the impending collapse of the industrial economy. Then a quick cut to a demonstration by the British Darts champion,” Dana recalled.

“We shouldn’t have been shocked. Most of us grew up in America’s fast food, fast information culture, but we were. Despite innumerable requests. We decided to turn down further media appearances, expecting all the attention to soon subside and for the real work of policymaking to begin.”

But that weekend, the opinion columns came out. Don Leish and Aurelio Peccei had ignited a global fuse of interest in their work, and not everyone was happy with their message. Particularly surprising were the bitter and emotional attacks by many economists, recalled Jay Forester.

“We thought the book lay outside their area of interest until we realized that it threatened the underlying belief that growth can go on forever.”

Writing in his regular Newsweek column, Yale economist Henry Wallich and future governor of the Federal Reserve called it a piece of irresponsible nonsense. The Economist magazine echoed his sentiments, stating that “the muddle support represents the high-watermark old-fashioned nonsense.”

Such was the need to set the record straight, it seems, that Henry Wallich held a talk for the entire society of American newspaper editors in Washington, where he accused Dr. Meadows of “using inappropriate methods to arrive at his results.”

Despite having never reviewed their model, he constantly told those gathered that “they were most certainly wrong, but that even in the very unlikely case the team were even remotely right, the prescription would still be wrong. The problems of levelling off growth,” he argued, “are not for our century, nor the next. And if the environment can’t take that much growth, there will be plenty of time for adjustment. The limitations imposed by the environment make themselves felt long before the ultimate limits are reached.”

Perhaps even more surprising than the backlash from economists was that of certain members of the scientific old guard who tended to view scientific progress as synonymous with technological progress as the main solution to mankind’s problems.

One such was Philip Abelson, editor of renowned journal Science. In his comments at the Smithsonian presentation, he took aim at the team’s assumptions about the growing problem of pollution.

Yet in his weekend editorial, Abelson went far further. To bolster his arguments, he quoted as fact accusations made by economists like Wallich. “Never mind that hardly a reputable economist can be found who thinks these projections amount to anything more than a fascinating exercise in model making.”

Thanks to the Club of Rome’s international reach, their critics were not confined to America.

The editor of renowned British journal Nature, John Maddox, a chemist, titled his own critique of The Limits to Growth, “another whiff of Doomsday,” he even published a book, The Doomsday Syndrome3. Just like his counterpart, Philip Abelson, Maddox found himself aligned with the country’s leading economists.

In several interviews, he was joined by the influential member of the UK’s Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution, economist Wilfred Beckerman. A few months following publication of their book, Beckerman was awarded the chair in economics at University College London.

Just as Wallich had felt the need to assure journalists of their wrong and inappropriate model, Beckerman dedicated his entire public acceptance speech to criticising the quote “implausible assumptions and ludicrous model of limits to growth.”

The criticisms eventually made their way to Jerome Wiesner president of MIT, whose office was within weeks inundated with letters of complaint and calls for the team’s dismissal.

Jay Forrester had one theory. “Part of the criticism”, he wrote, “seems to come from people who have been working on the same issues but have been caught off guard by the rapid progress of the work here and the interest shown in it. Some are unhappy because the conclusions are contrary to their hopes and expectations, others simply do not understand.”

Dana later described how as the critiques rolled in, the team took to sketching the connections and feedbacks across the walls in the lab. The scientists used the economists to bolster their case, which in turn gave credence to the economists whether or not they had read or understood their work. This in turn boosted the case for those who stood to lose out most from ending growth.

Here is Dennis Meadows talking about the actions of one major oil company in response to Dana’s book.

But not all corporations rejected their conclusions outright. Shortly after the book was published the MIT team received an invitation to meet with the heads of the great and good of American industry.

The message was simple. Businesses cannot be expected to save the world. If humanity is to survive, politicians will need to change the rules. The good news for the MIT team was that changing the rules was exactly what the organizer of the Stockholm Environment Conference, Maurice Strong, had in mind. A former Canadian oil magnate, here he is talking about his motivations a few months before the Stockholm Conference.

As Aurelio had hoped, Dana’s book had gotten Strong’s attention and he had taken their findings to heart.

But with the press interest rolling on without them, as Dana would later describe it, as the UN Environment Conference approached controversy over her book only intensified.

Good evening and welcome to the advocates. Tonight from Stockholm, specifically our question for debate this evening is this: Should the developed nations limit their economic growth?

A study which has been denounced as alarmist by almost every qualified analyst in the western world including the reviewers of both the New York Times and Britain’s famed economists.

“Everyone is talking about it”, wrote Don Lesh in a memo to Dana from Stockholm as the conference was getting underway, though he added, few appeared to have read it. To ensure world leaders did not take the critics word for it, he wrote how he had taken to handing copies out to passing delegates.

Though full of laudable aspirations, the resulting Stockholm Declaration contained not even a suggestion that the rich world should curb consumption or growth. Indeed, it specifically stated that there was a general agreement that a quote “philosophy of no growth” was completely unacceptable, even though the MIT team never implied economic growth would stop immediately, especially not in poorer nations.

“Maybe we were naive”, Dana later wrote. “Maybe we did want to save the world. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what was wrong with that.”

Their hopes of making leaders do what they thought was necessary to save humanity were fading. But they still had Elliott Richardson’s promised inquiry into limits to growth in the United States.

At the time, America was home to less than a tenth of the world population, but was responsible for half of all the logging, mining, refining and related pollution. If the United States were to change course, it could help chart the world in a new direction.

Richardson’s inquiry was due in just a few months time. To counter their critics, it was vital they published a technical report without further delay.

After much searching, a team of policy researchers at the University of Sussex in England stated an interest in their model. But when they attempted to replicate and test the MIT team’s work, they came to all together different conclusions.

If you check what happens if you vary all your assumptions together, then I understand from the science policy research unit at Sussex who have actually been checking your model, the catastrophe disappears all together.

The point about systems dynamics models is precisely that. It is a model of a dynamic, constantly changing system. One couldn’t force all the variables to move in lockstep, since that would be unrealistic. The Sussex team had ignored the interactions between the various parts. They had applied, according to the Meadows’ response, inappropriate methods and micro-reasoning to macro problems.

In the following months, further rebukes followed. One came from a chemical engineer from McGill University named Thomas Boyle, the same engineer who had snuck a draft copy out of the MIT lab. Boyle had found a typo which he claimed changed the outcome. In fact, it had no impact on the results, a point they could easily prove. But their old nemesis, nature editor John Maddox, published Boyle’s article.

It led to another flood of headlines claiming that the world had been saved by a decimal point.

Another attack came from a young and at the time relatively unknown economist named William Nordhaus. Like the Sussex team, he had attempted to replicate Jay Forrester’s first model. And like the Sussex team, he came to wildly different conclusions, which he laid out in his polemic, Measurements Without Data.

Jay Forrester wrote a carefully worded rebuttal: “Nordhaus had made the elementary mistake of taking each part of the model separately. But system dynamics analyses all the parts together. Not just the relationship between food and health, for example, but how our health impacts our ability to work, to earn money and consume, and how it all influences the amount of energy and resources we have, which in turn influences food and health and so on.”

But in an unprecedented breach of academic protocol, the economics journal refused to publish Forrester’s response.

When Elliot Richardson’s inquiry was finally published in January 1973, instead of an inquiry into limiting growth in the United States, it became an investigation into the possibility that the book The Limits to Growth was “wrong” in its conclusions.

In his forward to that report, Richardson expressed frustration with the results. “Current environmental problems inevitably force us to trade off some economic output to maintain an improved non-monetary but equally real environmental quality,” he wrote. “I had hoped that some breakthrough might be possible,” he continued. “But these papers argue that that is unlikely.”

He ended his statement by inviting further research onto the problem, because “these matters are so important.” Sadly, Elliot Richardson would not oversee any further research into limits to growth in America.

Shortly after his inquiry, he was moved to the Department of Defense, appointed Attorney General, and later that year famously resigned rather than do Nixon’s bidding to fire the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.

The team’s technical report, complete with evidence that addressed all those lies, half-truths and misconceptions about their work, finally passed peer review in 1974. Two years after Dana’s book had kicked up such a storm. Yet this time, its publication went unnoticed.

By then, at least in the United States, the political discourse had moved onto more pressing issues than the long-term survival of humanity. For some, especially those who had actually read their book, the oil and grain crisis of that year where signs our planet may already be entering overshoot.

For others, proof we needed more, not less economic growth. The one salvo to fix all of humanity’s ills. Just as the Club of Rome members had once believed. Yet as unemployment rose and living standards crumbled, even the Club of Rome began to distance itself from their book.

In 1975, co-founder Alexander King told journalists the club had been “surprised and a little embarrassed to be associated with zero growth.”

By the end of the decade, a neoliberal ideology had taken hold. It was rooted in the ideals of individualism and free markets, and predicated on the assumption that economic growth was good or even necessary for human progress.

There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams. And we were right.

“So how do you now live your life?” Dana asked herself at the end of her memoir. In the course of just a few years, Dana had gone from being conscientious scientist and technologist on track for a Harvard fellowship to, along with Dennis and her teammates, a laughing stock among global elites.

To boot, they had fallen foul of MIT, been more or less cut off from the Club of Rome and let down by their political leaders. They had also authored what would become a best-selling book, helping ignite a nascent environmental movement.

More importantly, they had learned that on our current path, our finite planets’ limits were likely to be reached far more quickly than almost everyone around them, and especially those in charge, were able or willing to see.

So if they wanted to change the world, they realised they would have to go out and do it themselves.

The work the team and especially Dana and Dennis Meadows undertook in the following decades around sustainable living, education, communication, advocacy, as well as in the science of world models and systems dynamics, would help lead the groundwork for a new wave of economic thinking, grounded in the science of planetary limits and focused on genuine human progress.

Thinking which now, more than 50 years after publication of the Limits to Growth, and with humanity now well into the ecological crisis they had tried to warn us of, is finally taking root. Of course, the period was not without its setbacks, nor its tragedies.

Where Are We Going, Really? (Part 3)

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, cities worldwide were already facing environmental crises. Many of them are vulnerable to climate change induced flooding, heat waves and drought. But Amsterdam is now experimenting with a radical new theory to create a more sustainable future for its residents.

We’re getting very, very clear signals from the earth system, from climate breakdown, from ecological breakdown, that the way we are pursuing growth is destroying the living systems on which we depend.

Kate Raworth of Oxford University calls herself a “renegade economist.” What makes the theory radical is Raworth’s assertion that governments need to stop looking at GDP growth as the ultimate measure of success.

In 2020, the Dutch capital of Amsterdam announced that it was setting a new economic goal, beyond economic growth, instead seeking to enable its citizens to thrive within the earth’s limits. Not only that, but Kate Raworth, the mastermind behind its model, cites Dana Meadows as among her core influences.

You see, following publication of her book, Dana embarked on a decades-long campaign to challenge the dominant narrative of endless growth.

Now, half a century on, that struggle, which was tragically cut short, may well be paying off. And yet, humankind’s predicament has never been more precarious, while growth remains the goal of most every national government around the world.

Economic growth is up.

Labour will fight the next election on economic growth.

I have three priorities for our economy: Growth, growth and growth.

So what can Dana’s story and the barrier she faced, not least from her old nemeses, the economists, tell us about what needs to happen if we are to yet avoid collapse, and instead achieve her vision of a sustainable world.

We wrote Limits to Growth and then moved to New Hampshire.

By the time the MIT project was over, Dana had given up all thoughts of returning to Harvard.

When you created a model, it indicates the upcoming collapse of civilization, and your leaders seem bent in ignoring you, priorities change.

They named Foundation Farm their new home in New Hampshire, after the series of 1950s sci-fi novels by Isaac Asimov, about an intergalactic empire that tries to maintain an island of civilization, while the social order of the universe collapses around them.

“We told ourselves and others that it would be a place where we would wait out the coming collapse,” wrote Dana. The kind of smart alec thing people say when they want to be shocking. The farm was not a place to hide while the world crashed around us. Rather, a place to try out the technologies and habits of a sustainable society.

Primarily because we wanted to try to live the sort of life that we thought might be a solution to the questions raised in that book, to see whether it was something we could advocate for other people, to try a decentralized, regional, educated kind of approach to life.

They intended to live with a small footprint, to try to grow food without chemicals and pesticides, to make their own clothes and furniture from the land, and use little energy and recycle all their wastes.

But they also wanted to show that living sustainably didn’t mean going back to caves, as their adversaries often accused them of. That meant sharing the work in a co-living arrangement with other families, a commune in other words, though Dennis hated the term.

And it meant remaining active locally and on the global stage. More engaged than ever in fact. The science in forming their life on the farm, in turn influencing their work and others in a positive, reinforcing feedback loop.

For Dana, it also meant deciding not to have children. Since learning of limits to growth, she had begun advocating for smaller families, especially in rich countries like her own. It was her way of reducing her own impact, and it allowed her, as she would later write, more time to do all the things she and Dennis thought they could, to work towards a sustainable society.

Today I would like to tell you what I regard as the essence of system dynamics as a philosophy for learning about complex systems.

A major part of that was teaching others. Learning about system dynamics from Jay Forrester had had a profound impact on Dana’s understanding of the way the world worked, and she wanted to help others gain the same wisdom.

She and Dennis took up teaching and research positions at the nearby Liberal Arts College, Dartmouth. True to the philosophy of the interconnected nature of system dynamics, she refused to be pigeonholed in one department, but insisted in working across faculties. And if it didn’t work out, she was prepared to go elsewhere.

I think we had a very rare, privileged introduction to this institution in that we both came there, not caring whether we got fired. So neither of us needed to do things Dartmouth way, and we proceeded not to. I insisted on an interdisciplinary appointment, which was unheard of at the institution and still creates problems for them. We tried some new things, and they didn’t fit very well, but they succeeded.

Dana’s interdisciplinary environmental studies program, the first of its kind, was soon oversubscribed, and it would set a blueprint for other colleges around the country.

I’d like next to introduce Edward Morgan, commentator on ABC News.

I suspect that the reaction to this book is going to be sharp from reactionaries, from people so wedded to a lifestyle at the Chamber of Commerce and others have made so sacred that they can’t think of anything being virtuous that isn’t growth. And I think it’s up to us in the media, in the news media, to mount a basic education program.

December 15, 1988. Let’s do the environment story better this time. The media are buzzing with ecological consciousness. Garbage barges and the greenhouse effect are on page one. PBS and CNN are making documentaries on the state of the planet. College Environmental Science enrollments have tripled this year.

This is Dana writing, not in her memoir, but in a weekly column that was by then syndicated in some 20 American news titles.

Two years earlier, she and Dennis had separated amicably and remained close friends and colleagues. But to mark her new face in her life, Dana decided to rekindle her love of writing and make peace with the media spotlight.

How much can our economy and every other nation’s economy grow before the Earth’s ecosystem is irreparably damaged? Our first guest is Dr. Donella Meadows. Welcome to the program, Dr. Meadows.

Thank you very much.

“As an environmentalist, I greet these stirring with mixed emotions,” she wrote. “Part of me says it’s high time. Another part of me still bears scars from the last ecological fad. If this spurt of attention is to lead to real improvement, the environmentalists and the media together have got to do a better job this time around.”

Because in the years that followed Limits to Growth, as the hippie era died out, environmental concerns too seemed to fade from the public consciousness. Dana started her column in the hope of reigniting a movement and raising awareness to new evidence of growing ecological and human development problems.

Her advice to herself and others? Don’t play on guilt and fear. Play on reason and vision. Don’t castigate those who aren’t acting. Spotlight those who are. Tell the truth, but don’t dramatize it. And don’t assume you have to make anyone care. Give people ideas of what they can do with the care they already have in much greater measure than most of us are willing to believe.

So that is what she did. Alongside her weekly column she wrote a monthly newsletter to friends, colleagues and many others. In her letters and her columns, Dana sought to connect the local with the global, the heart with the head. She helped contextualize abstract or far away issues like global hunger or global warming. Playing up the good while being frank about the bad.

Her vignettes about life on the farm reminded readers that we are all fundamentally connected to and dependent on nature.

Dana also wanted to portray her ecological lifestyle not as the sorry story of sacrifice her nemeses liked to, but abundant, joyous, more fulfilling even, as Dana had once said, than that of the prevalent cultural pattern of America.

All together she published some 700 columns. It landed her a book deal, a Pulitzer nomination and a MacArthur Genius grant.

Dana later used her experience to teach classes in environmental journalism at Dartmouth, helping raise a new generation of ecologically aware reporters.

Talks will end this week at the United Nations. Talks aimed at reaching an agreement on limiting the emissions of global warming gases. President Bush has expressed guarded interest.

But I am not going to go to the Rio conference and make a bad deal or be a party to a bad deal. I am not going to sign an agreement that does not protect the environment and the economy of this country.

When the first wrote Limits to Growth, the MIT team could only work with what scientists thought might happen, based on our knowledge of the few known problems that had been properly studied, such as lead poisoning and DDT.

By the late 1980s, a combination of research and far more powerful computing power had enabled science to advance considerably. It turns out a lot had happened in 20 years, much of it concerning. In particular, scientists now had evidence that greenhouse gas emissions caused by burning fossil fuels and clearing forests were causing our planet to warm at unprecedented rates, with potentially devastating impacts to nature and to ourselves.

And global warming was not the only problem. Around the same time, Canadian ecologist William Rees and Swiss urban planner Mathis Wackernagel calculated what they would term humanity’s Ecological Footprint[footer](1996) Our ecological footprint: Reducing human impact on the Earth. ISBN:9780865713123[/footer]. This is the amount of nature the average human being consumes each year, like farmland and fish stocks, and the amount of natural sinks, or oceans, forests and atmosphere, that are required to absorb our pollution.

Their finding? Humanity had already started to overshoot the Earth’s carrying capacity, and worse, we seemed to be showing no signs of slowing down.

Humanitarian problems too remained persistent. In two decades, the poorest parts of the world had seen little to no improvement in levels of hunger, malnutrition or poverty.

Moreover, as outlined in the landmark 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future, many of the actions taken to solve social problems, like increasing food or energy access, were worsening environmental ones.

MIT team member Jørgen Randers once said how, when they first published The Limits to Growth, he thought they had failed to convince leaders because they could not yet see the problems. Surely now that signs of overshoot were actually visible and measurable, things would be different.

To try to revive global will to solve the growing Problematique, the United Nations organised a follow-up event to the Stockholm Conference, an Earth Summit to be held in Rio in the summer of 1992. Ahead of the Rio conference, the Meadows made another attempt to influence the powers that be.

Shortly after publication of their book, their longtime supporter, Aurelio Peccei, had helped found the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, a pioneering research facility to promote collaboration across the Iron Divide.

From the connections they made in their regular trips there, the Meadows began organising an annual gathering in nearby Hungary, bringing together scientists and experts from across cultures and disciplines to exchange knowledge and collaborate on research in the growing field that Dana would later term sustainability.

It was on the basis of the knowledge that they had amassed over the past two decades that they now came together with former colleague Jørgen to update their original model. They knew that humanity had overstepped some biophysical limits.

What shocked them was how economic growth, a doubling in real terms in the size of the global economy in just 20 years, rather than helping steer the world to a safer path, had taken it further towards the cliff edge. Humanity was still tracking dangerously close to the scenario in which collapse takes place around the middle of the 21st century.

And yet there were still signs of hope. Population growth in richer nations, the world’s largest consumers, had fallen faster than in their standard run. Advances in energy efficiency had progressed further than expected.

As Dana once wrote, it hadn’t been possible to farm productively without chemicals in the 1970s. By the 1990s, it was.

If these developments could be harnessed for good, if we could immediately act to stem pollution, especially of greenhouse gases, and curb the undifferentiated economic growth that was pushing us beyond the Earth’s safe limits, there was a chance of reversing the overshoot and finding a safe landing.

I think it’s important to illustrate the possibilities of collapse, which are close and scary. It’s also important to understand that there’s a possibility of a sustainable world ahead. 8 or 9 billion people could be supported on this planet sustainably below the limits, with no hunger, with no poverty.

Dana and her colleagues felt that this new book was even more important and urgent than the first. We had now gone beyond the limits. But to avoid being labelled as doom-sayers, she also took pains to end the book on a note of optimism, with a clear and positive vision of a sustainable world that would be cleaner, more beautiful, more equitable and more prosperous than the one we were sliding towards.

She even, after much discussion with her colleagues, allowed herself to talk about the changing culture that could help bring about this turnaround, of a need for an economic system that represented core human values of care, empathy and love.

They sent their book to 10 publishers and received 10 rejection letters. The first book was so strikingly fresh in its vision and approach, “This doesn’t seem to go beyond I told you so,” read one response. “I think the climate has changed enough to make this book an unlikely seller,” answered another. And a third, perhaps most prophetically, “Its power, greed and self-interest in the part of government, if you ask me, and love ain’t gonna get it.”

Indeed, when they finally found a publisher for their new book, ‘Beyond the Limits’, it received just a fraction of the attention of their first. Part of the disinterest, 20 years on, was thanks to a common perception that their original work had already been discredited, perpetuated in a 1989 Forbes article written by correspondent Ronald Bailey.

Bailey claimed, incorrectly, that the MIT team had forecast humanity would by now have already run out of a number of key metals and minerals. But Bailey had misread a table in Dana’s book, which was intended to illustrate the concept of exponential growth and how quickly limits could be reached should there be no more mineral discoveries.

As was clear to anyone who had read the book, the team investigated many scenarios and even their standard run assumed mankind would continue to make new discoveries in the coming decades, as it had in previous ones.

The main factors leading to a decline in the standard run are the exponential rise in pollution and the erosion of nature. Yet, Bailey’s claim spread like wildfire among skeptics and continues to haunt the book’s reputation to this day.

But there was something else at play. Just as scientific evidence on humanity’s impact in our environment was strengthening, so too were the lobby and interest groups that sought to protect the status quo.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Cato Institute and our policy forum today, the end of the world as we know it, the Apocalypse Lobby goes to Rio.

This book, Beyond the Limits, which is the sequel, of course, sort of like most bad movies, they get a sequel, to The Limits to Growth and in that intervening time they haven’t learned anything except to make more sophisticated lies.

Twenty years ago there was no forum like this where you could criticise this kind of thinking. Now Cato and many other solid groups speak for the truth about the environment and natural resources in connection with a free economic system.

The last person heard speaking here was economist Julian Simon. In the two decades since The Limits to Growth, most economists remained critical of the book’s conclusions, indeed, its entire premise that economic growth and environmental protection may at some point become incompatible.

To economists and the politicians they advised, growth was not just a means to overcome environmental limits. It was a way to mask social problems too.

Since the 1970s the United States and other rich countries have begun slashing taxes to stimulate growth, leading to higher incomes but also widening inequality.

As economist Henry Wallich, a prominent Limits to Growth critic, had once said, “Economic growth is a substitute for equality of income, so long as there is growth there is hope. And that makes large income differentials tolerable.”

It’s perhaps not surprising then that elites, including even some elements of the scientific old guard who equated growth with progress, seemed to prefer the economists’ story too.

When Beyond the Limits hit the bookshelves, editor of the influential journal Nature, John Maddox and another long-time Limits to Growth critic, offered economist Wilfred Beckerman the honours of reviewing it. He labelled it as “yet more garbage in, garbage out.”

In the same issue he praised as accurate and scholarly a new model estimating the cost of global warming by another economist, Bill Nordhaus. This, you may recall, is the same economist who had attacked Jay Forrester’s first model and whose journal had refused to publish Forrester’s response.

Dana was deeply concerned. As Nordhaus would later recount, he was one of few economists to even consider global warming a problem back then and even struggled to get his papers published in economic journals.

And yet to Dana his approach contained a number of fundamental flaws and since, “any one of these flaws would be enough to flunk a beginning student in system dynamics, I tend to be aghast that such models are made, let alone published.”

That was Dana writing to Nordhaus in response to his own attack on her new book, which he entitled, Lethal Models 2.

“I wish to clean up the flow of misapprehensions in which the economics community represents my work,” she wrote. “But more importantly, I want to try to reach across that tedious and fruitless power-down gap, which has kept us lobbying publications at each other for 20 years without having moved our argument even one step forward. “For I’m not only personally sick of this game, I also happen to think that the world no longer has time for it.”

To Dana, among Nordhaus’ fundamental flaws was his attempt to estimate an optimal level of warming that balanced the costs of changing our ways and paying for any damages, with the supposed benefits of more economic growth.

But he had based his estimates not on the growing body of scientific work about the risks of global warming, but a survey mainly of other economists whose projections were, perhaps unsurprisingly, far more relaxed than those of natural scientists. One scientist even wrote he feared the true costs could be incalculable if we really should let warming get out of control and refused to name a dollar price. So Nordhaus ommited his response.

He even went a step further by applying a discount rate to future costs. His somewhat baffling assumption? More wealth today means we’ll need to spend less, relatively, tomorrow. Thus, it is better to prioritise growth over more immediate action.

Yet Dana and her colleagues’ work had indicated quite the opposite. Because of natural feedbacks, as well as the time it takes for leaders to recognise and act on problems, delaying action today only makes it harder and more costly in future to alter course and lessens our chances of success.

Despite several exchanges which Nordhaus requested be kept confidential, he neither rescinded his criticism of Dana’s latest book, nor did he adapt his own models.

According to his calculations, humanity need only start to worry about warming when it reached around 3 or 4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. This is far above scientific consensus even back then, and a level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has since calculated would make large swathes of our planet, currently home to one-third of the world population, unlivable.

If this was just the work of one rogue economist, it may not have mattered. But since Nordhaus was one of few mainstream economists to care about climate change at all, he implicit support by the likes of Maddox, Beckerman and others whose interests aligned with infinite growth, enabled Nordhaus to set the blueprint for studies in environmental and climate economics in academic departments around the world.

His models would be adopted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which used them to determine when and by how much the world should reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2018, the economics community even awarded Nordhaus with the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

It is hard to overstate the implications. The choice of model determines the choice of policy. By overestimating the costs of action and radically underestimating those of inaction, the models developed by Nordhaus and his colleagues have arguably helped contribute to decades of climate delay. While Nordhaus’ personal attacks on Dana and her colleagues helped ensure their alternative, but likely far more realistic models such as those based on system dynamics, would largely be ignored.

So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor William Nordhaus.

The Arctic’s on thin ice and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

In late January 2001, Dana Meadows sat down to write her weekly global citizen column. She began, “The place to watch for global warming, the canary in the coal mine, is the poles. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by three degrees or so, which is precisely what is now happening.”

Dana was worried and she was tired. “The College Flu has been pursuing me since the beginning of the term, when the Dartmouth students brought it in from all over the nation and started circulating it around campus. Last night I finally got unbusy enough to give in to it,” she wrote in her monthly newsletter.

“I’m intending to stay this way only for this weekend; after that there’s too much to do again.”

The Rio conference, like its Stockholm predecessor, had failed to produce a binding agreement on our environment and specifically on tackling global warming.

Several years later in Kyoto, certain industrialised nations finally knocked out a plan to gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But thanks to perception that tackling climate change would be too costly for its economy, the United States refused to ratify it.

By the turn of the century, emissions and temperatures were rising exponentially. And that meant Dana was busier than ever.

On her desk was a half written textbook on systems thinking and sustainability, lesson plans for her classes at Dartmouth, policy papers produced by her quote “think-do-tank”, the Sustainability Institute, which she had set up several years earlier to help foster the transition to sustainable society.

And her personal favourite, plans for a nearby eco-community, a project which she had helped initiate and which encapsulated her vision of how she hoped we would one day all live. Indeed, she planned to move there herself that summer.

But she would not go to Cob Hill Farm. She would not recover that weekend. The college flu that had been circulating around campus was not flu, but meningitis. Her condition deteriorated and Dana Meadows died, age 59, on February 20th, 2001.

We need to stop the madness with which we are treating nature.

Wildlife populations have fallen by nearly 70% since 1970.

Statistics are overwhelming. Most data suggests at least 7 million people, perhaps as many as 10 or more million people a year dying from air pollution. Most of that from the burning of fossil fuels.

Fertilizers, pesticides and metals poison our oceans.

Substances are now outpacing our ability to verify if they’re safe.

A new report from the United Nations warns that at our current rate, the world is set for disastrous overheating.

The floods have caused tremendous suffering. Tremendous suffering. Unspeakable suffering.

I have never seen climate carnage on this scale. I have simply no words to describe what I’ve seen.

When they first published Limits to Growth, it was the slights by scientific elites that arguably caused most damage, bolstering the arguments of anyone else, especially the economists, who rejected the idea of ending growth. But in the years since Dana’s passing, science has finally come around to the idea of planetary limits.

In 2009, none other than British journal Nature dedicated an entire issue to a new landmark study led by Earth’s system scientist, Johan Rockström, who we’ve just heard speaking in a recent interview with Dennis Meadows.

The study was entitled “Planetary Boundaries – A Safe Space for Humanity“4.

The work of an interdisciplinary team of 30 scientists; it marked a first attempt to quantify critical thresholds of damage our planet’s systems can sustain before we start to endanger humanity.

The team found that there do indeed exist certain limits. There are limits for example on levels of atmospheric warming, ocean acidification, volumes of aerosol pollutants and depletion of freshwater resources which if passed, start to erode the conditions for life on Earth.

Shortly after the report’s release, Oxford economist Kate Raworth tried to envisage the kind of economic system that could enable humanity to thrive within the planet’s ecological limits.

She drew a circle to represent the planetary boundaries and within that a smaller inner ring to represent the foundation of basic human needs. Too much damage pushes us beyond the outer ring, beyond the ability of our Earth to sustain us indefinitely. Too little of what we need to thrive, like nutritious food, clean water, education and democratic voice, threaten human wellbeing.

She reasoned that the task for this century must be to get everyone within that sweet spot between the two rings. Standing back, she realised that that sweet spot looked well, like a donut.

Raworth cites as inspiration ecological economics, a field that emerged around the same time as Limits to Growth, but which has been broadly dismissed by the economic mainstream.

Another inspiration was Dana Meadows’ playbook on how to think in systems5, completed and edited by her former assistant, Diana Wright.

Anyone who’s familiar with the work of Donella Meadows, she wrote this phenomenal book that’s profoundly influenced making thinking systems and she talks about the different leverage points for intervening in the system. And right down the bottom is, you know, you could tweak the tax rate, but going higher and higher at the leverage at the top is changing the paradigm. So I think, you know, one of the most powerful forms of protest is to propose something new.

Raworth’s book, Donut Economics6, was released in 2017. Like The Limits to Growth, it has become an international bestseller. Not surprisingly, her work has largely been ignored by mainstream economists. However, it has captured the imagination of students, educators, activists and progressive political and business leaders.

In 2020, the Dutch capital of Amsterdam became the first city to announce a goal to become a donut city. Since then, coalitions promoting the donut have emerged in some 70 cities and regions around the world.

Four big tipping element systems are likely to cross their tipping points already at 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is why we have so strong scientific evidence today for defending and holding on to the 1.5 degrees Celsius planetary boundary.

That was the voice again of Earth’s system scientist, Johan Rockström, this time discussing, in May 2023, the latest science on tipping points in our climate system.

Tipping points are those points at which, as in Dana’s example of the Kaibab Plateau, a system has pushed so far that it starts to irreversibly tip into a new state.

As the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets start to melt, less heat is reflected out into space, speeding up the melt. As ocean warming and acidification kill off coral reefs, less carbon is absorbed by marine life, leading to more heating, leading to more die-offs. As permafrost thaws, greenhouse gases that have been buried for millennia are released, and so the thawing accelerates.

Nearing any one of these tipping points would be cause for serious alarm. To risk breaching all four should surely call for an immediate transformation of our economic priorities.

In the same week that Johan Rockström gave that talk, the World Meteorological Organization warned that there is now a two-thirds chance of breaching the 1.5 degree warming limit within the next five years.

And climate change, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, is just one of nine planetary boundaries.

Harms from our food and agricultural system, such as runoff from fertilizers into our waterways, freshwater depletion, deforestation and collapsing insect populations, have also moved beyond the safe limit. And by reducing the ability of our soils and oceans to store carbon, these in turn make us more vulnerable to climate change.

For the past 15 years, we’ve identified nine biophysical systems that we have scientific evidence that they contribute to regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth’s system. And unfortunately, the conclusion is that six of the nine are outside of the safe space. We’re continuing to move in the wrong direction. It’s not enough to just phase out fossil fuels. We also need, even for a safe climate landing, to come within planetary boundaries. This is the only chance for us to hold on to 1.5.

Despite significant technological advances and massive increases in wealth in the past half-century, breaking the reinforcing feedbacks between economic growth, resource use and pollution has been much harder than critics of Limits to Growth were willing to admit. Renegade economists like Raworth put forward that it is our obsession with growth itself that prevents us from solving our ecological crisis.

Yet most mainstream economists, using models that fail to account for ecological feedbacks or tipping points, insist on the possibility of green growth, one in which we can continue growing our economies while continually decoupling from environmental harms. Some point to evidence of cleaner energy systems in Europe as a sign decoupling is possible.

Ecological economists such as Tim Parrique, who have researched evidence of decoupling, have concluded this is not the case. One reason is that improvements, say, in energy efficiency, tend to get plowed back into increasing production, often leading to more harmful growth than before.

Another is that most economic decoupling from greenhouse gas emissions has involved changes in energy systems that did not harm corporate profits or require changes in behaviour. But actions needed to avoid ecological collapse within needed timescales may require scaling down whole industries.

And post-growth economist Jennifer Hinton, using the tools of systems dynamics to study the for-profit economy, found that polluters tend to push back against any measures that harm growth or profits.

Indeed, the more governments try to pursue growth in order to solve the ecological and social crisis, paradoxically, the more likely they are to give in to polluters in order to achieve it.

Thirty years on from Dana’s attempts to find common ground with her economist critics, a new generation of economic scholars is now calling for an end to the dependency on growth, and some even for degrowth, like French scholar Tim Perique, heard speaking here.

In May 2023, two and a half thousand scholars, experts, policymakers and activists from across Europe met in the European Parliament8 for three days of intense debate and discussion on how Europe could build a post-worth economy, putting the well-being of citizens at its core.

Discussed policies ranged from scaling down wasteful and destructive forms of production, to expanding access to quality public services, to supporting care work and funding green job guarantees, to implementing wealth taxes, shorter working weeks and citizens’ assemblies at every level of government.

Coupled with reforms to make fairer global trade and financial systems, a swift transition in rich countries within Europe would also enable poorer countries with the lowest footprints to safely increase their resource use until a sufficient social foundation is reached. Or as some put it, degrowth for the rich, green growth for the poor.

And one of the most rousing calls for such a transition to a post-growth economy came from none other than the new co-president of the Club of Rome, Sandrine Dixson-Declève.

Dana Meadows once wrote that the most powerful way to change a system was to change the paradigm of the system, such as by replacing the goal of economic growth with that of human and planetary wellbeing. People who cling to paradigms, which Dana wrote is just about all of us, take one look at that spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and peddle rapidly in the opposite direction.

But in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea for a moment or for a lifetime has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment.

We may have been wrong to ignore The Limits to Growth, but if there can be any fitting legacy for the MIT team and in particular for Dana Meadows, it may be that thanks to her work and the work of those she and her colleagues inspired in the following decades, an increasing number of people are finding themselves empowered to change the system.

I think the biggest part is simply showing up in the public debate with the long-term view and with the whole world view, being willing to speak out, to question growth, that growth which when it is undifferentiated, when we just go for it without any consideration of its sustainability, its equity or its quality, to question that kind of growth and say, what material growth actually do we need for whom, at what cost, and how long can it be continued, especially to point out who benefits and who gains and who in the short term and the long term, to do that insistently.

Finally, this is the hard question. This is the question that will be foremost in a sustainable world, to ask where are we going, really what is this progress for, what is this growth for, what is this economy for, what is this planet for and what is our purpose on it, the questions we flee from, especially in the public arena.

Nobody wants or needs growth. What people want or need is material sufficiency, long-term security and sustainability, equity, and a purpose larger than accumulating material things.

That discussion itself, I think, will make the difference between the two kinds of futures that we’ve talked about here today.

Thank you.

This was the third and final part of Tipping Point, the true story of The Limits to Growth.

This podcast was researched, created and produced by myself, Katy Shields and Vegard Beyer.

Nora Beyer composed and produced the original music score.

Anna Magdalino was responsible for sound editing and the artwork is by Amy Shields.

You can find links to all episodes across all major podcast platforms, as well as the full credits and acknowledgements at tippingpoint-podcast.com, where you can also subscribe to stay updated about future projects.

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Thank you for listening.