Reading 23 Limits to Growth1 Overshoot

Reading 23 Limits to Growth1 Overshoot To overshoot means to go too far, to go be- cal, political, psychological, or other features of a yond limits accidentally—without intention. Peo- system. ple experience overshoots every day. When you The delays, too, arise in many ways. They may rise too quickly from a chair, you may momen- result from inattention, faulty data, delayed in- tarily lose your balance. If you turn on the hot formation, slow reflexes, a cumbersome or quar- water faucet too far in the shower, you may be relling bureaucracy, a false theory about how the scalded. On an icy road your car might slide past system responds, or from momentum that pre- a stop sign. At a party you may drink much more vents the system from being stopped quickly de- alcohol than your body can safely metabolize; in spite the best efforts to halt it. For example, de- the morning you will have a ferocious headache. lays may result when a driver does not realize how Construction companies periodically build more much his car’s braking traction has been reduced condominiums than are demanded, forcing them by ice on the road; the contractor uses current to sell units below cost and confront the possi- prices to make decisions about construction activ- bility of bankruptcy. Too many fishing boats are ity that will affect the market two or three years in often constructed. Then fishing fleets grow so the future; the fishing fleet owners base their deci- large that they catch far more than the sustainable sions on data about recent catch, not information harvest. This depletes the fish population and about the future rate of fish reproduction; chemi- forces ships to remain in harbor. Chemical com- cals require years to migrate from where they are panies have produced more chlorinated chemicals used to a point in the ecosystem where they cause than the upper atmosphere can safely assimilate. severe damage. Now the ozone layer will be dangerously depleted Most instances of overshoot cause little harm. for decades until stratospheric chlorine levels de- Being past many kinds of limits does not expose cline. anyone to serious damage. Most types of over- The three causes of overshoot are always the shoot occur frequently enough that when they are same, at any scale from personal to planetary.2 potentially dangerous, people learn to avoid them First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. or to minimize their consequences. For example, Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, be- you test the water temperature with your hand be- yond which the moving system may not safely go. fore stepping into the shower stall. Sometimes Third, there is a delay or mistake in the percep- there is damage, but it is quickly corrected: Most tions and the responses that strive to keep the people try to sleep extra long in the morning after system within its limits. These three are neces- a late night drinking in the bar. sary and sufficient to produce an overshoot. Occasionally, however, there arises the poten- Overshoot is common, and it exists in almost tial for catastrophic overshoot. Growth in the infinite forms. The change may be physical— globe’s population and material economy con- growth in the use of petroleum. It may be fronts humanity with this possibility. It is the fo- organizational—an increase in the number of cus of our work. people supervised. It may be psychological— Throughout this text we will grapple with the continuously rising goals for personal consump- difficulties of understanding and describing the tion. Or it may be manifest in financial, biological, causes and consequences of a population and political, or other forms. economy that have grown past the support capaci- The limits are similarly diverse—they may be ties of the earth. The issues involved are complex. imposed by a fixed amount of space; by limited The relevant data are often poor in quality and time; by constraints inherent in physical, biologi- incomplete. The available science has not yet pro- 1Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, excepts chs 1 and 4 from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, 2004. Authors’ references omitted. 2emphasis added 159 Reading 23 Limits to Growth duced consensus among researchers, much less Three of these viewing devices are widely used among politicians. Nonetheless, we need a term and easy to describe: (1) standard scientific and that refers to the relation between humanity’s de- economic theories about the global system; (2) mands on the planet and the globe’s capacity to data on the world’s resources and environment; provide. For this purpose we will use the phrase and (3) a computer model to help us integrate that ecological footprint. information and project its implications. Much of The term was popularized by a study Mathis this book expands on those three lenses. It de- Wackernagel and his colleagues conducted for the scribes how we used them and what they allowed Earth Council in 1997. Wackernagel calculated the us to see. amount of land that would be required to provide Our fourth device is our “worldview” an in- the natural resources consumed by the popula- ternally consistent set of beliefs, attitudes, and tion of various nations and to absorb their wastes. values—a paradigm, a fundamental way of look- Wackernagel’s term and mathematical approach ing at reality. Everybody has a worldview; it in- were later adopted by the World Wide Fund for fluences where they look and what they see. It Nature (WWF), which provides semiannual data on functions as a filter; it admits information consis- the ecological footprint of more than 150 nations tent with their (often subconscious) expectations in its Living Planet Report. According to these about the nature of the world; it leads them to data, since the late 1980s the earth’s peoples have disregard information that challenges or discon- been using more of the planets resource produc- firms those expectations. When people look out tion each year than could be regenerated in that through a filter, such as a pane of colored glass, year. In other words, the ecological footprint of they usually see through it, rather than seeing it— global society has overshot the earth’s capacity to and so, too, with worldviews. A worldview doesn’t provide. There is much information to support need to be described to people who already share this conclusion. it, and it is difficult to describe to people who The potential consequences of this overshoot don’t. But it is crucial to remember that every are profoundly dangerous. The situation is book, every computer model, every public state- unique; it confronts humanity with a variety of is- ment is shaped at least as much by the worldview sues never before experienced by our species on a of its authors as by any “objective” data or analy- global scale. We lack the perspectives, the cultural sis. norms, the habits, and the institutions required to We cannot avoid being influenced by our own cope. And the damage will, in many cases, take worldview. But we can do our best to describe centuries or millennia to correct. its essential features to our readers. Our world- But the consequences need not be catas- view was formed by the Western industrial soci- trophic. Overshoot can lead to two different out- eties in which we grew up, by our scientific and comes. One is a crash of some kind. Another is a economic training, and by lessons from travelling deliberate turnaround, a correction, a careful eas- and working in many parts of the world. But the ing down. We explore these two possibilities as most important part of our worldview, the part they apply to human society and the planet that that is least commonly shared, is our systems per- supports it. We believe that a correction is possi- spective. ble and that it could lead to a desirable, sustain- Like any viewpoint—for example, the top of able, sufficient future for all the world’s peoples. any hill—a systems perspective lets people see We also believe that if a profound correction is not some things they would never have noticed from made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And any other vantage point, and it may block the it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are view of other things. Our training concentrated on alive today. dynamic systems—on sets of interconnected ma- These are enormous claims. How did we ar- terial and immaterial elements that change over rive at them? Over the past 30 years we have time. Our training taught us to see the world worked with many colleagues to understand the as a set of unfolding behavior patterns, such as long-term causes and consequences of growth in growth, decline, oscillation, overshoot. It has human population and in its ecological footprint. taught us to focus not so much on single pieces of We have approached these issues in four ways—in a system as on connections. We see the many ele- effect using four different lenses to focus on data ments of demography, economy, and the environ- in different ways, just as the lenses of a micro- ment as one planetary system, with innumerable scope and a telescope give different perspectives. interactions. We see stocks and flows and feed- 160 Reading 23 Limits to Growth backs and thresholds in the interconnections, all wastes (greenhouse gases, toxic substances) with- of which influence the way the system will behave out exceeding the productive or absorptive capac- in the future and influence the actions we might ities of the world.

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