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Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth Professor Emeritus Dennis Meadows University of New Hampshire, USA

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Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth Professor Emeritus Dennis Meadows University of New Hampshire, USA 81 Session 2 | First Presentation Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth Professor Emeritus Dennis Meadows University of New Hampshire, USA thank the conference organizers for inviting me to participate in this conference. It has given me the opportunity and incentive to I think further about an issue that has been my lifelong preoccupa- tion: the importance of unifying our understanding of the different scientific disciplines. During forty years as a professor, I was on the faculty of three different universities. At the first, I was a member of the business faculty; at the second, my title was Professor of Engineering; and at the third university, I was a tenured professor in the social sciences. I was assigned three different academic labels, although I was always involved in similar efforts. Unfortunately, universities try to organize knowledge by disciplines rather than by problems. Because they did not understand the unity of science, each of the three schools had to fit me into one of their traditional categories. This made it much more difficult to carry out the sorts of collaborations needed to address actual problems. Here I will discuss one of those problems. While thinking about the topic “Environmental Crises and the Limits to Growth,” I was reminded of my father. Some years ago, he became very sick, and we hired many specialized doctors to treat him. When my father had a high fever, we found a specialist who could reduce the fever. When he started to get headaches, we found a different specialist who prescribed pain killers. When he began having trouble eating, we found a third specialist who recommended changes in his diet. Each specialist achieved the results he sought. But none of them prevented my father from dying. Why? He died because the fever, headache, and stomach problems were not at the root of his illness — they were merely symptoms. My father had can- 82 Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth cer, and he died because we focused on the symptoms of the disease, not on the actual problem, the cancer. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells. The globe’s envi- ronmental crises today are being created by cancers: uncontrolled growth in population and uncontrolled growth in industrial output. Climate change, depletion of groundwater, pollution of the air, erosion of soils, and many more of the emerging global environmental crises are symptoms. They can and are being addressed by specialists. But if humanity does not recognize that the underlying problem is growth, the system will eventually die. One does not come to understand this problem through specialized science. It takes an understanding of the total system, involving unification of the sciences. In the early 1970s, as a professor at the MIT management school, I assembled a team of sixteen scientists to study and understand the growth of the human population and industrial production around the globe — their causes and possible consequences. We built a com- puter model to integrate relevant theories and data related to physi- cal growth from many different specialties, such as demography and economics. By unifying these sciences, we created a single image of the globe: a global computer model named World3. One cannot make accurate predictions about the future with even the best conceivable model. But a good model can be the basis for providing useful portraits about different possible future evolu- tions of important variables. We call those portraits, “scenarios.” In our research we used World3 to generate a variety of scenarios that helped us understand the likely future implications of different devel- opments in society, economy, technology, and the environment. Below is a summary of the conclusions published in our 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. It is followed by a summary of the results of recent research conducted by others in Australia and the Netherlands, to assess the accuracy of our scenarios. I will portray some data about the environmental crises we now face. To deal more effectively with these crises, we will need to look across disciplines, using a vocabulary that helps unify the relevant sciences. Thus I will suggest some changes in the way we think and talk about these crises. To achieve any type of attractive future for our global society, we will need a new perspective and a new vocabulary. Professor Dennis Meadows 83 I will conclude by suggesting some ways of talking about environ- mental crises that can be helpful for developing more successful actions in the future. In our 1972 book, we wrote, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” Figure 1 is the so-called standard or dominant 200-year scenario pro- duced by our model1. The left side portrays the world in 1900, and the right side shows possible values for important variables in 2100. Our model calculated possible values for several hundred different global 1 The following citation is from the third edition of our 1972 report. It gives the same results as the first edition. I cite it here because the first edition is no longer in print. Meadows, D.H., et. al., Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green, VT, 2004, page 173. Figure 1 A Collapse Scenario Original Today Report Industrial Output Population Pollution Pollution Curve Resources Food 5 84 Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth factors. The main variables, shown in Figure 1, were industrial output, population, persistent pollution, resources, and food. When we published the book in 1972, the world was at the stage portrayed by the vertical red line, with a great deal of growth left ahead. We anticipated no immediate problems. Currently, the world is at the stage indicated by the vertical black line. Global society is just starting to experience the consequences of serious reductions in growth. We ran our model under many different assumptions. Some of them produced scenarios that suggested society could possibly pro- duce different futures, avoiding the worst consequences of those lim- its. But one could not do this with the so-called “hard technologies” alone. New devices, new equipment, and new energy sources would not be enough to change these results. In 1972, we concluded that if one could quit emphasizing growth and start working on the soft technology side, one could produce a much more attractive future. This is called a “sustainability scenario,” Figure 2 A Sustainability Scenario Industrial Output Food Population Resources Pollution 6 Professor Dennis Meadows 85 shown in Figure 22. In this projection, the human population is more or less stabilized, the standard of living is quite high, certainly above the average of what you see in Korea today — maybe something like France, not super-wealthy but totally acceptable. However, one had to start making the changes very quickly. Some leaders understood our message. For example, Sicco Man- sholt, the fourth president of the European Commission (1972–1973) and an author of key ideas leading to the European Union, said, “We do not need growth. Without growth per capita, that means growth in material consumption, we can better survive.” Jimmy Carter, presi- dent of the United States from 1977 to 1981, said, “We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has rec- ognized its limits.” But most people paid no attention to these ideas and continued to pursue the same pro-growth policies. Thus there has been increasing growth until today, and the global system appears to have increased far beyond its sustainable limits. This issue of limits and sustainability is a very difficult one, philo- sophically, morally, and technically. One useful approach to the issue has been carried out by the Swiss scientist Mathis Wackernagel, who defined the concept of the global ecological footprint and used it to discuss the ability of the globe to sustain the human population. His numerical calculations from 1960 up to the present suggest that in 1960, the population and industrial output were still below the capac- ity of the earth to support an industrial civilization. As there were no successful efforts to slow the population and industrial growth, the annual demands of the human population for energy, resources, food, water and related resources continued to increase. Today, Wacker- nagel suggests that global society has expanded to almost twice the sustainable capacity of the planet. Recently, the CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization), which is the national research and scientific organization in Australia, did a study comparing two of our scenarios with the recent evolution of global data. They compared our scenarios for sustainable development and for collapse against the recent empir- ical data. Their results were presented in a recent report by the Dutch 2 Op. cit, page 245. 86 Environmental Crises and Limits to Growth Figure 3 9 national environmental organization. That Dutch illustration (Figure 3) shows that global society is following the overshoot scenario. This is not a big surprise. Much of the media currently presents daily evidence of these problems. Here I will mention some of that evidence, not to prove anything but to illustrate that this issue is now widespread across all aspects of the environment. Petroleum remains the overwhelmingly dominant energy source for our society. Every single year since 1984, with a small exception, the world has used more oil than it has discovered. Society is now drawing down the big discoveries from back in the 1950s and 1960s, and the major oil producers do not expect such large discoveries anymore. For this reason, energy has become more expensive.
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