9 August 2017
By Dr Kerryn Higgs for Dick Smith Fair Go.
I came across The Limits to Growth by accident just after it came out in 1972. There were a number of scientists who had already sounded related warnings in the 1960s: Rachel Carson in Silent Spring observed that the expansion of the chemical industry was decimating bird populations; Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb drew our attention to the risks of unrestrained human population growth; and a new school of ecological economists began arguing that only a steady state economy would be sustainable into the future—where population on one hand, and production and waste on the other, were stabilised. One of the ecological economists, Kenneth Boulding, warned that the days of the “cowboy” economy of limitless resources was over and humanity faced a new situation which he called “spaceship Earth.”
But it was The Limits to Growth that brought the idea of natural limits on the human economic system into the foreground of public debate. The team who did the research and published the book (Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens), were commissioned by the Club of Rome, founded a few years earlier by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist.
As a graduate in History and English, I had only a general knowledge of science and economics when I discovered the book. The economic growth that was accelerating all around me seemed normal and not limited by anything I knew of. As a Gippslander, I had witnessed the destruction of the LaTrobe Valley’s Haunted Hills in the 1950s and 60s, and the arrival of the brown coal bonanza. I felt deep regret when the exquisitely beautiful ferny forest at Gunns Gully was swallowed by an open cut mine, but it was universally celebrated as progress and good for Victoria, however heart-breaking.
The Limits to Growth became the best-selling environmental book of all time, even though it is a rather technical little book which outlines various scenarios that were fed through the Meadows team’s World3 computer program. Data about the many interacting aspects of the economy and the environment were combined with different scenarios about what might change or stay the same.
The crucial limiting factors were tied up with industrialisation and booming populations: the depletion of resources, the pollution of the natural world and the persistence of widespread malnutrition. The standard run, or business as usual, led to collapse around the middle of the current century. Even massive technological advance could not avert this outcome. But there were scenarios that could: Collapse could be avoided if we stabilised population and stabilised the scale and rate of material extraction and waste.
This book changed everything for me and set me off on the journey that required me to study both science and economics and resulted in my 2014 book Collision Course: Endless growth on a finite planet (MIT Press). I assumed in 1972 that Limits would open all eyes and have a huge impact on the conduct of human affairs. At first there were promising signs: President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau both commissioned studies to look further into the implications for their countries and the world. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. In fact, “Club of Rome” gradually became a term of abuse in mainstream economics and politics, as the backlash against ideas about limits gained the upper hand. More on how this was done in a future post.
It’s forty-five years later now and, worldwide, it’s been pretty much business as usual. The models that the Meadows team used in their World 3 computer program were rubbished by their critics, especially mainstream economists: “Garbage in, garbage out” as one put it. But in recent years, several researchers have checked the Meadows projections against what has actually happened. It turns out that the correlation between the standard run (business as usual) and the real world, over the intervening 45 years, is surprisingly close. Charles Hall and John Day could not find “any model made by economists that is accurate over such a long time span.”
So the Limits project was not a case of garbage in, garbage out. The repeated assertion that “the Club of Rome got it wrong,” still heard today, was incorrect.
As we head towards the third decade of the twenty-first century, the multiple crises that worried the Club of Rome fifty years ago have deepened. The Meadows team published two updates on Limits (1992 and 2004); the most eminent scientists of the world, including over half the living Nobel Laureates, told us that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course” in their Warning to Humanity in 1992; James Hansen, the climate scientist, addressed the US Congress in 1989 and warned the world that global warming was already in progress; the United Nations Environment Programme released its Global Environment Outlook (GEO) every five years, telling us in cautious and measured terms that the natural environment is being destroyed—GEO-6 is due later this year. But all of these interventions were mere blips in the main game of decision-makers around the world—the grab for growth that has dominated the era of economic rationalism (also known as neoliberalism) since the 1970s.
So progress has been glacial and insufficient. We are breaching the boundaries of planetary resilience: we’re in danger of heating the planet beyond human survival in many locations, melting so much ice that sea levels obliterate coastal cities and oblige delta and island people to evacuate their ancestral homelands; we are pouring nitrogen and phosphorous into our rivers, oceans and aquifers, killing off water-based life; we continue to eliminate vast swathes of forest, grassland and wetland so we can expand our agriculture, industry and ports (and use the trees for paper and timber); we continue to throw away millions of tonnes of plastic every year and our oceans are now choked with vast areas of floating debris eaten by unsuspecting birds, turtles and fish; at a frightening rate, we are liquidating huge numbers of the individual animals with which we share the Earth—more than half of our fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have been lost since 1970; and more and more species face extinction.
Australian politicians rabbit on about “economic growth” every day, with all parties convinced that economic growth will solve the problems it has created. The same mantra is also heard worldwide across almost all nations and all the international organisations of world business and trade—as well as permeating the well-intentioned branches of the UN itself.
But it is the commitment to endless economic growth (in the physical sense) that underlies all the environmental damage. To the extent that economic growth does not involve further mobilisation of resources and production of wastes, economic growth could well be positive though, clearly, most economic growth has material elements. It’s also clear that large parts of the human world desperately need some degree of physical growth, just to provide basic needs like shelter, clean water, sanitation, food security, basic health and education services and minimal access to electricity, all of which have material dimensions. So it is all the more important that we who are already rich tackle our own growth fetish systemically so we can share the ecological space with them.
It’s been good to see in the last decade or so that a critical approach to growth is gradually gaining attention in some universities and some parts of the media. There’s a long way to go and the situation is urgent, but at least there are signs of serious concern.
***
Dr Kerryn Higgs is an Australian researcher, author and activist.
She published Collision Course: Endless growth on a finite planet (MIT Press) in 2014. It explores the resistance to ideas about limits, the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy-makers and the mounting influence of corporate-funded think tanks dedicated to the propagation of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers. She completed her PhD with the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania, where she is now a University Associate. She is a Fellow with the Club of Rome and an active member of Climate Change Australia, based on the mid-north coast of NSW.
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Karmel will you stop thinking of Australia as “just the same” as the rest of the world please! That’s how Britain got us into this mess!
You can’t send water inland to “green” it. If you look at most of our inland lakes, you will find they are salty and you can’t grow food in salty soil. Spinifex and saltbush aren’t all that edible and it’s not easy or economical to desalinate the land although attempts have been made. We have a GREAT tourist attraction in the Great Barrier Reef and we’re killing it for coal profits – why should greening the Red Centre be any different? Planning to plant grass all over Uluru are you?
Australia is already trialling GMO and there are a number of producers out there. No long-term studies on health, ignoring of the negative consequences of short term studies, just focus on $$$$$$$$$$$ and ridiculous growth of money to which humans are slaves. This is why our new houses are jerry-built and no matter how much we cut our electricity usage, the bills just get bigger. We HAD great wines, then we ditched quality for quantity and lost all the markets we’d gained – and our reputation suffered greatly – back in the 1980s and we haven’t learned better from it.
Focus on QUALITY of life, not QUANTITY of life (or in this case money – quality of money, what it can buy, not diluting it with quantity of people spending it).
The more of these pages I read, the more disgusted I become with our education system – and I wasn’t too crash hot on it in the first place!
The information quoted here has been around for decades – as is the other information I read about health and how supporting the money-making pharmaceutical companies in the totally misnomered pursuit of health is deliberately making us all sick so we’ll spend more money on drugs and even less on real quality food.
HOW does all the wrong/bad/counter-productive information get into the curricula and all the good/helpful/sensible information get blacklisted???
Give me an aquarian shark over a human one any day of the week…
Starvation in a toxic cess pool.
Close: Not the Australia I grew up with where the current crop of politicians and corporate bosses learned their mantra of continuous growth, but the culture of community and looking after the old and the young, the sick and the poor, definitely!
Your tenses could use some work. We’re already struggling, we’ll just struggle MORE after 8 billion than we are now. We’re not bearing down on those limits, we’ve passed them already which is why our standard of living is declining at such an alarming rate.
I don’t agree with most comments about climate change. We started keeping climate records as we started coming out of a mini-ice-age – of course the planet will warm at such a time! The point is, we have to deal with the ACTUAL climate, the warming of the planet – preferably not by further accelerating that warming ourselves by cutting down more oxygen-producing trees to house more carbon dioxide-producing humans (and methane-producing cows to feed them).
If we had REAL measures of intelligence, they would be how we further learn to work WITH our planet, our home, not against/conquer/exploit it. An example of this (in LA, but Sydney and Brisbane are not much better) is Firestone and General Motors buying up and dismantling the rail/public transport system to sell cars. Why is the taxpayer funding the reintroduction of part of this rail network after 70 or more years? Why aren’t Firestone and GM fined to the hilt for the deaths of humans from the pollution they’ve caused, ALL of those fines to go to funding the reintroduction of an efficient rail network??? Ditto extremely efficient electric cars, not the inefficient junk they allow to be sold now.
Why are our measures of intelligence not related to how we can work WITHOUT electricity – it won’t be there forever and it just increases our problems were we but to see it in the correct light. I bow to the REAL intelligence of the Aborigine who knew how to live WITH his environment and I scorn the so-called intelligence of the economist who can’t see the wood because he’s cut down the trees to make inedible, unpotable, unbreathable money.
Now THERE’s a double edged sword! Economic efficiency! I’ve pointed out to certain MPs that I cringe every time I see “improved” economic growth figures – it means the prices in the supermarket goes up when my pension doesn’t. I’m by now used to being ignored, but I don’t get used to being threatened with further cutting of my real-performance-shrinking pension.
To me, economic efficiency would be to cut the order of one billion $ battleship, the proceeds of which could help so many pensioners (schools, hospitals, roads which affect EVERYONE) but no, the Balance of Payments figures (for which I am supposed to be partially responsible) have to vastly increase by the price of battleship we buy from other countries and which then don’t even work! Talk about the lazy unemployment beneficiary who can’t be bothered to get work, but don’t give him a job or an apprenticeship to build properly working battleships ourselves!! Who teaches these economics anyway?
I think President sees much of what u say. Trade deals not in our interests. Australia can and does grow the best agriculture on the planet hopefully non gmo. Many millionaires around Asia, China, Russia willing to pay top dollar for top quality food. Overpopulation is a curse children – too many being born therefore continuing sexual and factory slavery no end to poverty. For a pop. of 30 m much would have to change. Our oceans are now cess pools of rubbish and drag nets killing all in their wake. A relative Geologist Ph.D said too many farmers on the Murray (1972) and will go dry and algie. We need infrastructure like the http://www.Bradfield Scheme to stop the run off onto destroying the reef. At same time sending water inland to green our interior – agriculture tourism in the millions $’s. Millions of jobs for Aussies (we are 3 million jobs short now). Stop immigration for 5 years till jobs housing catch up. Stop giving our taxpayer money away overseas while we have 300,000 homeless some disabled living (or trying) to, in tents 75 yr. olds living in cars. I used to love my Australia, for which my forbears fought, died and were wounded for. But these days we are behind so many progressive other nations going no where except down the river of no return. Keep up the fight for our homeland Dick – worth fighting for.
What a well written article Dick. This is spot on. I have been most passionate about this very issue and every time I hear our politcians speak of the virtues of growth I cringe. I plotted a graph on coal consumption since about 1820 to the current day. I did a log linear plot and did a classic e^x exponential curve fit over the actual data. I got a .97 correlation coefficient. Any one who is half mathematically literate can see you very quickly get insane unsustainable numbers if we keep growing . Growth is simply not sustainable long term. The term sustainable growth is an oxymoron.
Professor Al Bartlet (now deceased physicist) from Colorado very aptly put it. ” The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Speak up! Development, higher population, more consumption is driven by the perception that economic GROWTH is paramount. This is clear in the banking industry where the greater the amount of credit dished out to borrowers, the greater the profits and bonuses to bankers (at all levels). With more money circulating in the economy prices for goods and services are pushed up.
It’s not economic GROWTH that is important, but economic EFFICIENCY. Can we live better lives with less? That should be our goal, especially if there are more people in the world aspiring to live the western lifestyle.
Well done Dick and others. I cannot agree that Australian population should be 30m – it’s too high, considering soil quality, water and climate conditions of this continent.
DEMOGRAPHICS HAS BEEN & IS, ONE OF THE MAJOR LOCAL/GLOBAL ECONOMIC DRIVERS, for quite some time & certainly has been for much of the Modern Economic Era!
But, with THE TOTAL POPULATION LEVELS ALREADY SLOWING IN MANY COUNTRIES, DEMOGRAPHICS IS NOW A LEADING FACTOR IN OUR RECENT ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN!
In fact, THE GLOBAL POPULATION MAY WELL GET TO 8 BILLION, BUT IT SEEMS LIKELY TO THEN STRUGGLE BEYOND THAT & A GLOBAL DECLINE MAY WELL THEN BE LIKELY TO START, WHICH WILL FURTHER DRIVE OUR ECONOMIC STRUGGLES DOWNWARD!.
IN ADDITION, THERE ARE A FEW OTHER MAJOR ECONOMIC DRIVERS, which must come into the picture –
1) ENERGY – Supply & Pricing.
2) CLIMATE CHANGE – Likely to further Adversely affect our capacity for an increasing Population.
3) DEBT – Already TOO HIGH & BEING DRIVEN HIGHER.
In short, UNLIKE WHAT POLITICIANS & OTHERS MAY SAY, EVERYTHING HAS LIMITS & WE ARE NOW BEARING DOWN ON SOME OF THOSE LIMITS!
i totally agree with your ideas i would like to leave behind the same Australia that i grew up with.
I grew up with a backyard safe community parks knowing my neighbours i am now approaching
my late 70s and i could cry when i see what is happening to my beautiful Australia
wishing you and others all the very best in your endeavours in what you are attempting to do
for your fellow Aussies.
I was introduced to Meadows et al. as a student 30 years ago along with Trainer’s Developed to Death. Agree with Higgs, but this is a global problem. Restricting immigration ignores our privilege – our global footprint per capita is up there with the US and Western Europe. We need to be factoring in our global responsibilities as we figure this out. I recommend Springer’s Fuck Neoliberalim for a convincing argument about prefigurative politics as a way forward.
Pleased to meet you, Ben. I grew up with your films. From memory there was you and a female companion (wife)?) and lots of sharks.
It took all of history until 1800 for the worlds population reached 1 billion. In the next 200 years we breached 6 billion. Where will we be in another 200 years? Exponential growth eventually has to decay, what form will this decay take in terms of our future?
I totally agree with you Dick, good on you raising this problem. Even up here in Cairns area growth and jobs dominate over environment- bigger is better- yuk. I look back at the 60,s and think that was the best decade for me and probably the world. Count on me to back you up. Last time we talked was up at TI about Crab Island Crocs eating baby turtles. I went back there the next year and made a best selling film on it. Yes, we both think alike and sad to see the rapid changes that are not for the best. Best wishes Dick, Ben Cropp
I am in my seventies and time and again I deplore the rate of destruction and exploitation of our beautiful country. I have said many times the Best times are behind us. Our children and grandchildren will not have the same opportunities as we did nor the healthy lifestyle we enjoyed.
Mostly due to the greed of those in a position to exercise their power over the development and manipulation of our resources and land. I feel somewhat despondent when I look to the future.