Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future

In 1972 The Limits of Growth , sponsored by the Club of Rome and produced by a research team on a MIT computer programmed with a World3 model, created a stormy sensation. Denounced as eco-gloom and doom, the book also became a keystone of the era's environmentalism. Now on the eve of the June U.N. Earth Summit, three of the researchers give World3 another run. Although many books and reports examine ``sustainability,'' the authors provide unique insights thanks to their background in systems analysis. Society has gone into overshoot, they argue, a state of being beyond limits without knowing it. These limits are more like speed limits than barriers at the end of the road: the rate at which renewable resources can renew themselves, the rate at which we can change from nonrenewable resources to renewable ones, and the rate at which nature can recycle our pollution. Without being a catch-all on the environmental crisis, the book shows how we are overshooting such crucial resources as food and water while overwhelming nature with pollutants like those causing global warming. World3 runs 13 future scenarios and learns that we can only avoid collapse by unplugging the exponential growth in population (two billions people in the past 20 years) and industrial production (doubled in the past 20 years). If the world settles for two children per couple and the per capita income of South Korea, we can avoid collapse and find an equilibrium at 7.7 billion people through 2100. Systems analysis may sound like an academic specialty, but the authors have written for the general reader and provide a compelling challenge to traditional economics and public complacency. (Apr.)