Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on from The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next?

Limits and Beyond

50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next?

Edited by

Ugo Bardi

Edited by

Carlos Alvarez Pereira

First published in 2022 by Exapt Press

Copyright © 2022 Exapt Press, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers

Edited by Rob Worth, Editor-in-Chief, Exapt Press

Cover design by Andrew Brown, DesignForWriters.com

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or used in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hearafter invented, including pho- tocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Suggested reference:

Bardi, U. & Alvarez Pereira, C. (Eds.) (2022). Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next? A Report to the Club of Rome. Exapt Press.

202205201659

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-914549-03-8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-914549-04-5 (eBook)

Contents

Foreword

Mamphela Ramphele and Sandrine Dixson-Declève

Introduction

Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira

Echoes of a great book

1. Limits To Growth: The story of an idea

Ugo Bardi

2. A co-author’s view: What did The Limits to Growth really say?

Jorgen Randers

3. Questions about The Limits to Growth

Dennis Meadows

4. Crisis as a transition. What was, what will be.

Sviatoslav Zabelin

5. 50 years after The Limits to Growth

Dr Ernst von Weizsäcker

6. From limits to growth to planetary boundaries

Gianfranco Bologna

Still the economy, but what kind?

7. How the Club of Rome influenced the world’s agenda

Wouter van Dieren

8. Growth of what?

L. Hunter Lovins

9. Moving beyond limits to growth: Solidarity Capitalism

Dr Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien

10. Bhutan and beyond: The emergence of wellbeing economies

Julia C. Kim

New lenses for a different future

11. The Limits to Growth paves the way from future shock to futures resilience

Sirkka Heinonen

12. The historic The Limits to Growth report – 1972 and the present world

Yury Sayamov

13. Today’s human predicament: The convergence of tipping points

Sandrine Dixson-Declève

14. A reimagined future for generations to come: Life on a healthy planet

Mamphela Ramphele

15. The Limits to Growth rebooted: From patriarchal ignorance to collective stewardship of vital futures – A feminist perspective

Dr Petra Kuenkel

16. The Limits to Growth in the Asian century

Chandran Nair

17. Prosperity in resilience

Yi-Heng Cheng

Did we learn? Will we?

18. I did a data check on World3. Here’s what I found.

Gaya Herrington

19. How do we grow socially?

Chuck Pezeshki

20. What is relevance in a changing world?

Nora Bateson

21. Learning what we already know

Carlos Alvarez Pereira

Acknowledgments

About the Club of Rome

More from Exapt Press

Notes

Foreword

Mamphela Ramphele and Sandrine Dixson-Declève

Co-Presidents of The Club of Rome

The universe is conspiring to bring humanity to its inescapable destiny – being inextricably interconnected and interdependent within the web of life. Humanity’s attempts at escaping into a make-believe world of me, myself, and I have hit a dead end.

Limits and Beyond is a celebration of hard lessons learnt from 50 years of humanity’s resistance to the central message of The Limits to Growth report. It is our responsibility as the Club of Rome to remind global decision makers that we have collectively wasted 50 years of valuable time. As a consequence the book is also a reminder that humanity needs to move beyond the limits we set for ourselves to learn what we need to learn, and learn it, as we were invited to do in another report to the Club of Rome, No Limits to Learning, published in 1979.

This book is a rich compilation of deep reflections by members of the Club of Rome, as well as other partners who share a vision of a world characterized by wellbeing for all within an equitable global order for a healthy planet. It includes an updated perspective by two of the co-authors of The Limits to Growth and other prominent thinkers about what the book actually said, how it was received, what happened next and its relevance today.

One of the central lessons of past decades is that public and private agendas were captured by a particular school of economic thought, neoliberalism, obsessed with uneconomic growth at all costs. As several of the co-authors suggest, it is more than time to overcome this and adopt transformational economic models that embrace a systemic perspective to address humanity’s challenges.

Moreover, we need a rich diversity of perspectives if we want to liberate ourselves from the constraints we have created. As exposed in several chapters of this book, new lenses are required to imagine different and more desirable futures. Voices from Most of the World and from alternative perspectives are here included to show that we can reconnect with our humanity, provided we inquire on our blind spots. This book is coming out shortly after the publication of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. For the first time, the IPCC goes beyond reliance on so-called natural scientists as the sources of data and analysis, and included social scientists, indigenous knowledge experts and community leaders, as well as voices of young people.

This led to the acknowledgement that colonialism was a root cause of the climate crises. The report went further to recognize the impact of colonial history as an ongoing impediment to appropriate responses by humanity to adapt and transform their destructive lifestyles. In addition, vulnerable communities whose ecosystems were captured for the benefit of colonial conquerors and their post-colonial successors do not have the resources nor the capacity to respond appropriately to planetary emergencies.

In its last chapters, Limits and Beyond also reminds us that there are No Limits to Learning. There is a growing evidence of the huge untapped innate capacity in all humans to learn and come to grips with how complex living systems change. Work done in the most challenging environments has demonstrated the innate capacity of people to adapt. Its most important enabler is the encouragement for each to travel inwards to liberate themselves from a sense of worthlessness and fear of failure. Self-liberating education and learning environments tap into the innate capacity of even the poorest – young and old – and unleash enormous energy and creativity.

Contrary to some widely held views, human beings are wired to be connected. We are happiest when we are surrounded by loved ones who affirm and support us. And the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth coincides with a growing awareness by humanity at various levels that we are part of nature and that nature has infinitely more intelligence than we do. The Covid-19 pandemic has proven most effective in demonstrating our inextricable interconnectedness and interdependence. It has exposed the vulnerabilities of health, social, economic, financial, and political systems across the world and propelled us to a critical juncture that provides the opportunity and necessity to reshape our future, placing a value on what truly matters. Healing the legacy of brokenness imposed by dominant ways of thinking and relating to others and to nature is essential for all of us. Healing this brokenness is the opportunity awaiting humanity to become open to return to the essence of what it means to be human.

This book is a feast. It provides the reader with a rich variety of views on the critical issues facing us. It provides encouragement to all changemakers that change is not only possible, but underway. Look around you – change is hiding in plain sight. Let us reclaim our humanity and celebrate Mother Nature in her full splendour.

Introduction

Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira

The editors

This book originates in another one, published 50 years ago, which intended to open the space of possibilities for humanity to decide on its course. Many did not, and still do not, perceive The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report to the Club of Rome, as doing exactly that. What was mostly taken from the book was its strong warning of how dire the fate of humanity would be if we did not change what we understand as development. And to many this was not good news. It was rejected as a first step. And many ignored the book entirely as well as the endeavour behind it.

The Club of Rome had been founded in April 1968, as a space for open debate among personalities from different backgrounds – business, science, politics, civil society – equally committed to examine the future of humanity as a whole with a systemic, long-term, global lens. At the time no other organization was daring to ask some essential questions. One of them is now even more critical than in 1968: Can we achieve equitable wellbeing for all within a healthy planet?

Within the logic tying human development to the unlimited growth in consumption of material resources, one must ask how much is feasible within a finite planet, a question that traditional schools of economic thinking have been reluctant to consider. The Limits to Growth addressed it by using early computer modelling to produce a simulation tool and build a variety of future scenarios. Unfortunately, the simulation showed that in most of the scenarios, human civilizations would face collapse during the first half of the 21st century.

This finding shocked the world.

The Limits to Growth disrupted the conviction that conventional development and its expansion to the whole globe, as a programme of modernization and industrialization under Western hegemony, was necessary and legitimate for the sake of the progress of humanity.

The disruption was not appreciated by many in the established powers of the time. The possibility of scenarios in which human development would be redefined to fit within the boundaries of a finite planet was simply ignored. And when the concept of sustainable development was coined in 1987, it only questioned the nature of development inasmuch its negative effects could be considered as collateral issues to be addressed by more development of the same kind.

Humanity’s situation has changed a lot since 1972, and we are in worse trouble than anyone related to The Limits to Growth would have liked to see. The financial crisis started in 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic since 2020 and the many ongoing conflicts including the war in Ukraine in 2022 are brutal signals that everyone sees. They emerge from a larger background of unfolding existential threats. To name just a few: the growth of inequity and fractures within and between nations; climate warming; the destruction of ecosystems and species; and the use of finance and technology to segregate people instead of nurturing healthy societies.

At the same time, women are emancipating themselves everywhere. In many places, people are overcoming the helplessness derived from colonial and neocolonial rules and mindsets. Young generations are more aware of the failures of economic and political systems that are reducing possibilities in the future. And achievements of science and technology are breaking barriers, but also accelerating the possibility of dystopian futures with deeper divisions between winners and losers. All in all, it seems that humanity is thriving and committing suicide at the same time. We might be living in the brightest moment of humanity and be closest to the abyss of our self-induced extinction.

How can we deal with that fundamental contradiction? What we already know about how Life works might help. Living systems evolve all the time and occasionally enter critical zones from which they could emerge with completely new patterns. But could is not will. At critical points, the future is truly unknown. Jorge Luis Borges claimed that time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures. Erich Jantsch (co-founder of the Club of Rome) and Ilya Prigogine (member of the Club in the 1970s, and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) would have agreed with that literary expression, so well aligned with their own investigations on the self-organizing nature of the universe. Criticality might lead to emergence, but the process cannot be planned beforehand, and natural imagination and creativity play the leading role in giving birth to unexpected patterns unfolding into new harmonies within the larger web of Life.

This is where the expansion of the space of possibilities comes in. The Limits to Growth was an optimistic bet on collective intelligence to learn from the exploration of possible futures. Nowadays, the situation is even more critical than it was. We have to renew the bet on the humanity and capacities of everybody to create the conditions for a collective emergence from emergency.

This is the general context in which we (the co-editors) started imagining this book on occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth. In 2011, Ugo Bardi had already written a book to revisit the original report. Building upon that experience, we decided to explore further by asking 21 authors (including ourselves) to submit original contributions synthetizing their insights, perspectives, and feelings. We did not give them precise instructions on what topics we would like to see covered by whom, but the magic of emergence saw to it that there is very little overlap between the different contributions, which also reflects the diversity of backgrounds, disciplines, geographies, and cultures of the authors involved. We limited our task to organize the flow of contributions, combining the timeline (what did the book mean in its time? and later? and now? and for the future?) with the type of approach (from science, politics, economics, culture, and more). As you might expect, that diversity is also reflected in the wide variety of approaches, voices and styles of the different pieces, which we decided to respect. Life tells us that radical diversity is a must.

In the first section, Echoes of a great book, Ugo Bardi sets the scene with a detailed and in-depth examination of the original report, how it was received at the time, and how it could still be useful and relevant for our reflections today. Bringing in two of the original authors from the 1972 book, Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, we have the privilege to better understand what that book actually said and answer the most common questions that people have asked about it over the years. Unfortunately, we cannot have the voice of Donella Meadows, who played a prominent role in the crafting and impact of The Limits to Growth, and in the subsequent development of the whole domain of systems thinking. She left this world in 2002, not without writing a last piece titled Dancing with Systems, a brilliant evocation claiming for the mobilization of all our capacities, the rational as well as the embodied, to reconnect with the harmonies of living systems. This book is also a tribute to her invaluable work.

Sviatoslav Zabelin then follows with an insightful piece revisiting the collapse of the Soviet Union with the hypothesis that it had actually reached its own limits to growth. In the light of recent events, this line of thinking would certainly deserve further research. Ernst von Weizsäcker, for several years co-president of the Club of Rome, gives his impressions of the outstanding personality of Aurelio Peccei, the reception of the bestselling report in the political context of the 1970s and 1980s, and the attempt to promote the decoupling of wellbeing from the consumption of material resources. He also evokes Come On!, another collective report to the Club of Rome, published on its 50th anniversary in 2018. Gianfranco Bologna summarizes the evolution of scientific thinking inspired by The Limits to Growth, and particularly the work on climate change, biodiversity loss, and other ecosystemic issues, ultimately leading to the current concept of Planetary Boundaries, crafted in 2009.

In response to our generic invitation, several authors decided to focus their reflections on economic thinking and how limited its dominant schools are to grasp properly the challenges of humanity. To start the section titled Still the economy, but what kind?, Wouter van Dieren revisits his own involvement in the launch and initial impact of The Limits to Growth to sharply criticize the obsession of orthodox economics with growth at all costs. Following the line, Hunter Lovins goes further into a detailed, radical and well-documented deconstruction of the shortcomings of neoliberal economics. Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien even dares to explore the value of solidarity capitalism, an oxymoron she proposes to go beyond the limits to growth, by blending corporate social responsibility with elements of African cultures and decentralized digitalization. Next, building upon her experience with the philosophy and practice of Gross National Happiness in Bhutan, Julia Kim advocates for the emergence of wellbeing economies as an alternative paradigm to reconcile human welfare with the care of the ecosystems on which our lives depend.

In the New lenses for a different future section, thinkers from continents and cultures across the globe bring in their unique experiences and perspectives to imagine elements of the shift(s) required. Sirkka Heinonen emphasizes the value of learning, de-learning and re-learning and of futures thinking if we are to navigate the crises and shocks of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Nature is our ultimate teacher, she concludes. Yury Sayamov relates the intellectual reception of The Limits to Growth in the Soviet Union, where it was taken more seriously than in most Western contexts, with ongoing research on global social transformations and civilizational prospects.

Sandrine Dixson-Declève (co-president of the Club of Rome) builds upon the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic to claim that transformational economics is not only urgent but also possible. The convergence of multiple tipping points creates a complex emergency, but it is also the threshold to address the challenges of humanity through a systemic lens. The elaboration of a Systems Change Compass for the implementation of the European Green Deal in the EU context, in which the Club of Rome has been involved, is an example of such an endeavour.

Reflecting on what has changed since The Limits to Growth, Mamphela Ramphele (co-president of the Club of Rome) invites us to explore some fundamentals. What does it take to shift mindsets out of tensions between change and resistance? What role will the cultural shift, that is becoming evident in younger generations, play? And not least, what should we expect from diverging visions of Most of the World and the dominant Global North? The responses to these questions will deeply influence our future. The Club of Rome can have a catalytic role at the crossroads of these issues by better understanding how living systems change.

Petra Kuenkel proposes a feminist perspective, in the hope that a much stronger participation of women in how and what decisions are taken could lead to a shift from patriarchal blind spots to a collective stewardship for better futures. On his side, Chandran Nair proposes to label the 21st as the century of Asia, building on the evidence that the most populated continent is also quickly recovering its prominence in a multipolar world. From Asian perspectives, achieving Global Equity for a Healthy Planet, the motto adopted by the Club of Rome for this 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth, requires a strong role for the state facilitating a combination of shared prosperity and moderate consumption, quite a divergent approach from that followed in the West in the last decades. To continue with alternative worldviews, Yi-Heng Cheng engages in the appealing exercise of weaving Chinese traditional wisdom with requisites for prosperity in resilience. Acting as metaphors, the five traditional elements (water, wood, fire, earth, and metal) signal societal values for a new balance of opposing characteristics, that he connects with the five variables of The Limits to Growth.

Last, but not least, the Did we learn? Will we? section ponders where we go from here. Has humanity taken in the lessons of The Limits to Growth? What have we learned in the meantime? And, most importantly, what can we do about it now? Gaya Herrington compares the scenarios simulated in the 1972 book with the factual evolution since then and elaborates how these could be used as references for an essential debate among different societal priorities. Doomsday prophecies are not the appropriate framing for that debate to be effective, and humanity has better chances if we follow our own instincts since, as she says, we love life more than growth. Chuck Pezeshki puts empathy at the centre of how we could grow socially, a way out of our addiction to material growth. The path he proposes, inspired by network science, implies redefining evolution by getting rid of its exploitative and non-cooperative interpretation, in order to develop the capacities of everybody.

Nora Bateson proposes a deep dive into ecological interdependencies to learn from the complexity of living systems. She delves into the relationality of all human societies, whatever the attempts to split reality into separate boxes. Though framed in a what’s in it for me? mode, relationships can become actually devitalized. But giving them again a central role, they can also lead to an ultimate unifying beauty. To conclude the book, Carlos Alvarez Pereira (vice president of the Club of Rome) proposes to learn what we already know. Learning only happens when we change. We did not learn in the last 50 years, but we identified that the use of an inadequate lens to understand the world and our role in it is a major obstacle. Our relationship to time, and with it the current concept of capital, are framed by the past and present distribution of power and hinder the potential of future generations. As Aurelio Peccei said in 1984, a Human Revolution is needed to live at peace with nature.

If you opened this book looking only for responses, it might disappoint you. Its purpose is to open the space of possibilities, which can only happen by asking better questions. And good questions open minds, unveil blind spots and lead to responses leading to other questions rather than to closed solutions. The endless flow of questions and responses is Life itself.

In his foreword to No Limits to Learning, another seminal report of the Club of Rome published in 1979, Aurelio Peccei formulated our challenge as a riddle: What we all need at this point in human evolution is to learn what it takes to learn what we should learn – and learn it. This book is an invitation to share the excitement of this learning adventure, for our own sake and of the generations to come.

Echoes of a great book

Chapter 1

Limits To Growth: The story of an idea

Ugo Bardi

Faculty Member, University of Florence

Summary

In 1972, the Club of Rome sponsored the publication of a study titled The Limits to Growth (LtG). It was not the first to examine the long-term trends of modern civilization, but among the first to do that quantitatively by means of models. A robust feature of the model results was that the global economic system was going to collapse at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century. The study was initially praised, then it went through a barrage of demonization that consigned it to the dustbin of wrong scientific ideas. Only with the new century a reappraisal started and, in 2011, I published a book titled The Limits to Growth Revisited, ¹ one of the first studies aimed at a comprehensive review of the validity of the 1972 book. Today, in 2022, the Club of Rome is publishing a new book that aims to tell the story of the first 50 years of the study. The present section of this new book is based on my 2011 book, but it is a completely new revisitation of the subject and tells the story of how the idea of civilization growth and collapse fared in history and how it was interpreted by the LtG study.

There will come the The Day of the Lord, like a thief in the night.

—   Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, (5,2)

The Cycles of Civilizations

Some five thousand years ago, the first human civilizations appeared over an arc of land that spanned the whole of Eurasia, from the fertile crescent of the Near East to the Yangtze valley, in China. Over the years, new civilizations were born and spread all over the world, building cities and roads, increasing their population, and conquering their neighbors. They all had one thing in common. First they flared up, then declined and disappeared leaving only ruins, tombs, and sometimes inscriptions on rocks where one or other great ruler stated that his glory would never end. But few empires lasted more than a thousand years, and most disappeared after just a few centuries. Our modern civilization, the one we sometimes call The West or Globalization, had its origins in Europe about a half millennium ago, in the great expansion period that we call The Renaissance. Now, it is old enough that it may be facing its demise.

But why do civilizations follow this cycle of growth and collapse? It is a question that never made those who asked it popular, especially if they concluded that collapse was coming soon. Nevertheless, the ups and downs of ancient civilizations were noticed, and, in some cases, we can still follow ancient discussions on this subject. Perhaps the first mention of a collapse comes from the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, the first author of texts whose name we know. In one of her hymns to the Goddess Inanna, written some 4,500 years ago, she described an epic battle between the goddess and a mountain, a story in which we can recognize the collapse of the fertile land caused by erosion. ² , ³

Much later, the Roman Empire became one of the largest empires ever seen in history, but it had to face decline, too. The first hints that something was not going well for Rome appeared during the 1st century AD, when Lucius Annaeus Seneca noted in one of his letters that the way to ruin is rapid. ⁴ During the same period, the early Christians interpreted the trend in religious terms as related to the coming parousia, the manifestation of God, that would end not just the Roman Empire, but also the human experience in the material world. Later, this view was called Millenarianism, typical of religious sects.

But the Romans, just like most historical civilizations, went through collapse nearly completely unaware of the reasons for what was happening to them. We have a chilling report from the 5th century AD, the last century of the Empire, written by a Roman patrician, Rutilius Namatianus. He could see the ruin of the world around him, but he couldn’t understand that he was witnessing the last gasps of the Roman state. Everything he saw, he understood as a temporary setback, and he fully expected Rome to soon return to its ancient glory. This idea persisted for a long time in history and perhaps the last attempt to recreate the Roman Empire was when Benito Mussolini engaged in creating what was perhaps the shortest-lived empire in history: the Italian Empire that only lasted from 1936 to 1943.

In our times, recreating the Roman Empire seems to have gone out of fashion, yet, as late as in 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote a paper titled The End of History? ⁵ where he described the dominance of Western civilization as equivalent to the Pax Romana during the Roman Empire, destined to last, if not forever, at least for a long, long time. The events that followed showed the limits of Fukuyama’s ideas, but we still seem to be stuck with a view that sees collapse as unthinkable or, at least, unspeakable. The troubles of Western civilization are evident, but most people tend to see the situation as a temporary setback, to be corrected, at most, with minor adjustments. Then, the "Pax Occidentalis" will be the rule forever.

This optimistic view may be the result of the expectation generated by the golden decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the world’s economy experienced a growth rate probably never seen before in history. And it was not just the economy growing, technological progress appeared as an unstoppable force leading to continuous growth all the way to the foreseeable future. With cheap and abundant nuclear energy, all problems could be solved, including that of running out of mineral resources. That was not to be feared according to a concept that was grandly described by the physicists Goeller and Weinberg as the Principle of Infinite Substitutability. ⁶

The central idea of those years was the control of nuclear fusion, the energy that powers stars. With that, the wildest dreams would have been possible. In 1974, the physicist Gerard O’Neill, proposed a grand scheme of space colonization based on gigantic artificial habitats capable of housing millions, perhaps even billions, of people. ⁷ An even grander scheme had been proposed earlier on by Freeman Dyson ⁸ with the ultimate limits of humankind being reached by creating an immense solid sphere (the Dyson Sphere) around the sun. Flying cars? Those were just toys. What we really wanted were starships to reach other stars and colonize the whole galaxy!

But, despite the optimism of those years, there also existed also a thread of reflections that went in the opposite direction. Perhaps the first in modern times to discuss civilization collapse was Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). Gibbon’s book was a detailed description of the fate of the Roman Empire that clearly reflected the preoccupation that the same destiny could befall the modern civilization. Gibbon denied that possibility but, clearly, he had identified a line of thought that was starting to penetrate the discussion: if the Roman Empire, glorious as it had been, had disappeared, what was in store for the modern civilization?

Not much later, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published his book An Essay on the Principle of Population where he noted, perhaps for the first time in history, that there were physical limits to the expansion of the human population. Curiously, and contrary to the common perception, Malthus was never a catastrophist. That is, he never predicted collapses of any kind. He only noted that famines and wars would necessarily limit human growth to a certain level. And he didn’t even say that it would have been a static level: he saw it growing, although not as fast as the population. Nevertheless, he was demonized and sneered at for having made wrong predictions to the point that, today, being defined as Malthusian is understood as an insult. That was to be a common destiny for many later catastrophists.

In time, others examined the problem of the limitation of natural resources. William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question in 1865. ⁹ He was pessimistic (and correctly so) about the capability of England to keep extracting and burning coal for more than a century or so, but he never predicted an economic collapse. On the same line of thought, although one century later, the geologist Marion King Hubbert was the first to examine the long-term cycle of oil extraction, ¹⁰ predicting that it would reach its limits by the start of the 21st century. Hubbert was later described as a catastrophist and a Malthusian, but he, like Malthus, never mentioned collapse. He saw crude oil