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Limits to Growth
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Book Overview

Table of Contents

Authors' Preface

Global Ecology
 
The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of ecological planet sustainability. A work of stunning intelligence.


Published
June 2004

The debate over how many people the Earth can support has ranged across the centuries. Between 1679 and 1994 more than 60 studies were done on the question of the Earth’s human population capacity, with results ranging from one billion people to 1,000 billion people.

There are many ways to examine the question of over-crowding, but no final conclusion. Relying on personal observations is problematic: Walk across Manhattan, and the world looks crowded; fly over the Midwest, and there seems to be an abundance of open land. Many city dwellers relish the sort of hubbub that might drive residents of a Nebraska farm community to distraction. The notion of “overcrowding” has a personal dimension. It is mutable.

On a planetary level, it is reasonable to assume we will never all find ourselves packed together as tightly as those in Manhattan. Something—many things, probably—will give way first. Will it be the food we grow in a thinning layer of topsoil? The dwindling supply of potable water? The atmosphere’s limited ability to handle our increased output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases?

No one can say with any certainty which limit will be reached first; ecological interactions (geological, human, microbial, oceanic, etc.) defy the current state of scientific knowledge.

The Limits to Growth- 1972
In 1972 four young scientists at MIT wrote a book called The Limits to Growth that shocked the world and became an international best-seller. Using the World3 computer model, the authors looked into the future and sounded an alarm, for the first time showing the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet. Their book gained worldwide attention and became the cornerstone of a global debate on how to achieve a sustainable future.
 
Beyond the Limits- 1992
Twenty years later the authors wrote Beyond the Limits, a follow-up volume that showed humanity was already overshooting Earth’s limits. Beyond the Limits again provoked a national debate and galvanized the scientific and environmental academics leaders to incorporate Limits to Growth into the core environmental studies curriculum.
 
The Limits to Growth- Update 2004
Now The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update brings data on overshoot and global ecological collapse to the present moment. It provides a short course in the World3 computer model, types of growth, and the various kinds of overshoot likely to occur in the current century. While it remains to be seen whether public policy will respond effectively and in time to problems such as climate change, this book makes a compelling case for the vital need for a Sustainability Revolution.

 
Order Limits to Growth
$22.50 Paperback
368 pages
June 2004

Authors of the Book

Donella Meadows, who died unexpectedly in 2001, was a systems analyst and adjunct professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College and wrote the nationally syndicated newspaper column “The Global Citizen.”
 
Jorgen Randers is a policy analyst and President Emeritus of the Norwegian School of Management. He lives in Oslo, Norway.
 
Dennis Meadows is a professor of Systems Management and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Durham, New Hampshire.
 

 

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