Donella H. Meadows - The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind

HOPES AND FEARS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

POTOMAC ASSOCIATES is a nonpartisan research and analysis organization which seeks to encourage lively inquiry into critical issues of public policy. Its purpose is to heighten public understanding and improve public discourse on significant contemporary problems, national and international.

POTOMAC ASSOCIATES provides a forum for distinctive points of view through publication of timely studies and occasional papers by outstanding authorities in the United States and abroad. Although publication implies belief by Potomac Associates in the basic importance and validity of each study, views expressed are those of the author.

POTOMAC ASSOCIATES is a nontaxexempt firm located at 1707 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.

A POTOMAC ASSOCIATES BOOK

Donella H. Meadows

Dennis L. Meadows

Jrgen Randers

William W. Behrens III

Universe Books

NEW YORK

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Potomac Associates.

Second printing before publication 1972
Third printing 1972
Fourth printing 1972
Fifth printing 1972

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73187907
ISBN 0876631650
Design by Hubert Leckie
Printed in the United States of America
Published in the United States of America in 1972 by Universe Books,
381 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016
1972 by Dennis L. Meadows

DOI: 10.1349/ddlp.1

To Dr. Aurelio Peccei, whose profound concern for humanity has inspired us and many others to think about the world's longterm problems

IN APRIL 1968, a group of thirty individuals from ten countriesscientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, and national and international civil servantsgathered in the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. They met at the instigation of Dr. Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrial manager, economist, and man of vision, to discuss a subject of staggering scopethe present and future predicament of man.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Out of this meeting grew The Club of Rome, an informal organization that has been aptly described as an "invisible college." Its purposes are to foster understanding of the varied but interdependent componentseconomic, political, natural, and socialthat make up the global system in which we all live; to bring that new understanding to the attention of policymakers and the public worldwide; and in this way to promote new policy initiatives and action.

The Club of Rome remains an informal international association, with a membership that has now grown to approximately seventy persons of twentyfive nationalities. None of its members holds public office, nor does the group seek to express any single ideological, political, or national point of view. All are united, however, by their overriding conviction that the major problems facing mankind are of such complexity and are so interrelated that traditional institutions and policies are no longer able to cope with them, nor even to come to grips with their full content.

The members of The Club of Rome have backgrounds as varied as their nationalities. Dr. Peccei, still the prime moving force within the group, is affiliated with Fiat and Olivetti and manages a consulting firm for economic and engineering development, Italconsult, one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Other leaders of The Club of Rome include: Hugo Thiemann, head of the Battelle Institute in Geneva; Alexander King, scientific director of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Saburo Okita, head of the Japan Economic Research Center in Tokyo; Eduard Pestel of the Technical University of Hannover, Germany; and Carroll Wilson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although membership in The Club of Rome is limited, and will not exceed one hundred, it is being expanded to include representatives of an ever greater variety of cultures, nationalities, and value systems.

THE PROJECT ON THE PREDICAMENT OF MANKIND

A series of early meetings of The Club of Rome culminated in the decision to initiate a remarkably ambitious undertakingthe Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

The intent of the project is to examine the complex of problems troubling men of all nations: poverty in the midst of plenty; degradation of the environment; loss of faith in institutions; uncontrolled urban spread; insecurity of employment; alienation of youth; rejection of traditional values; and inflation and other monetary and economic disruptions. These seemingly divergent parts of the "world problematique," as The Club of Rome calls it, have three characteristics in common: they occur to some degree in all societies; they contain technical, social, economic, and political elements; and, most important of all, they interact.

It is the predicament of mankind that man can perceive the problematique, yet, despite his considerable knowledge and skills, he does not understand the origins, significance, and interrelationships of its many components and thus is unable to devise effective responses. This failure occurs in large part because we continue to examine single items in the problematique without understanding that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that change in one element means change in the others.

Phase One of the Project on the Predicament of Mankind took definite shape at meetings held in the summer of 1970 in Bern, Switzerland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. At a twoweek conference in Cambridge, Professor Jay Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented a global model that permitted clear identification of many specific components of the problematique and suggested a technique for analyzing the behavior and relationships of the most important of those components. This presentation led to initiation of Phase One at MIT, where the pioneering work of Professor Forrester and others in the field of System Dynamics had created a body of expertise uniquely suited to the research demands.