There are limits to everything
By Helen Smith
TWENTY years ago, a book called Limits to Growth warned that humanity was on the verge of eating and poisoning planet Earth into extinction.
It sold nine million copies and had tremendous impact. It helped usher in an era of environmental awareness when governments, for the first time, were forced to consider the effect of their decisions on the earth’s dwindling resources.
But the book’s dire warnings failed to come about. Prices for oil and other commodities did not soar, they fell in real terms. And countries like China and India were not reduced to wholesale starvation.
Now three of the book’s authors have produced a sequel, Beyond The Limits, which says their earlier predictions are indeed coming true and that we may be teetering on the verge of extinction.
This sequel, timed as a curtain-raiser to next month’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, argues that the world’s obsession with economic growth is one of the biggest threats to the planet’s survival.
The authors, all academics, based their predictions on the same computer model used to produce Limits to Growth.
They say that "in spite of the world’s improved technologies, the greater awareness, the stronger environment policies, many resource and pollution flows (have) grown beyond their sustainable limits."
Populations still threaten to expand beyond the earth’s capacity to feed them, industry is poisoning the air and seas and we are burying ourselves beneath our own waste. Without major policy changes the earth’s resources could be exhausted early in the next century.
The solution, say authors Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, is a revolution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution that transformed the world economically, socially and politically in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Catastrophe can be averted, they say, through a drastic shift in attitudes from the rich and powerful down to the most poverty-stricken.
The poor must be persuaded that big families are bad, the rich must be less materialistic.
The authors reject conventional economic thinking to propose a "sustainable society" in which levels of production would be restricted and produce fairly distributed.
"A sustainable society would not freeze into permanence the current inequitable patterns of distribution. It would certainly not permit the persistence of poverty," Beyond the Limits says.
The authors admit their proposals are likely to sit uncomfortably in a world that has largely dismissed communism as a failed doctrine and does not accept utopian ideals of equal distribution of wealth.
But there is no alternative, Beyond the Limits says. It warns of the dangers in the view, held by many world leaders, that the future lies in unfettered markets.
"An unregulated market system governing a common resource inevitably leads to overshoot only political constraints of some kind can protect the resource."
The book’s authors, while united in their belief that catastrophe threatens, disagree over whether it can be averted.
"Most people are not in favour of sacrifice. People either haven’t understood the situation or don’t want to understand the situation," said Landers.
Landers fears human beings will change their attitudes and lifestyle only when environmental crisis is upon them.
But Donella Meadows is optimistic. She believes that people would restrain their wants if they were aware of the threat facing them.
"The world’s population would respond if they were presented with the choice." But people lack information, she says.
Both Landers and Meadows reject suggestions that the unfulfilled prophecies of Limits to Growth damaged their credibility and could undermine the impact of their latest book.
"I think we were very largely misunderstood and misquoted," said Meadows.
Donella Meadows is Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. She has worked as environmental consultant to the US Congress and has written nine other books on environmental issues.
Her husband, Dennis Meadows is Director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of New Hampshire. Jorgen Randers is Professor of Policy Analysis at the Norwegian School of Management. — Reuter
Source : The Star, May 26, 1992
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