Donella Meadows Jorgen Randers - The Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update

LIMITS TO
GROWTH

The 30-Year Update

DONELLAMEADOWS

JORGENRANDERS

DENNISMEADOWS

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT

Copyright 2004 by Dennis Meadows

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in The United States
First printing, May, 2004

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Printed on acid-free, recycled paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meadows, Donella H.

Limits to growth : the 30-year update / Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-155-4

1. Economic developmentEnvironmental aspects. 2.

PopulationEconomic aspects. 3. PollutionEconomic aspects. 4. Sustainable development. I. Randers, Jorgen. II. Meadows, Dennis L. III. Title.

HD75.6.M437 2004

330.9dc22

2004000125

Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Post Office Box 428

White River Junction, VT 05001

(800) 639-4099

www.chelseagreen.com

Dedication

Over the past three decades many people and organizations have helped us understand how limits to material growth will shape global futures. We dedicate this volume to three individuals whose contributions were fundamental:

AURELIO PECCEI, founder of the Club of Rome, whose profound concern for the world and undying faith in humanity inspired us and many others to care about and address the prospects for humanitys long-term future.

JAY W. FORRESTER, professor emeritus of the Sloan School of Management at MIT and our teacher. He designed the prototype of the computer model we have used, and his profound systems insights have helped us understand the behaviors of economic and environmental systems.

Finally, it is our sad honor to dedicate this book to its main author, DONELLA H. MEADOWS. Widely known as Dana, by all those who respected her and appreciated her work, she was a world-class thinker, writer, and social innovator. Her high standards for communication, ethics, and service still inspire and challenge usand thousands of others. Much of the analysis and prose here are hers, but this book was completed after Danas death in February 2001. We intend that this edition will honor and advance her lifelong effort to inform the worlds citizens and coax them toward sustainability.

Contents

Appendices

Background

This book Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is the third edition in a series. The first text appeared in 1972. where we discussed global developments over the first 20 years in the scenarios of LTG. This 30-year update presents the essential parts of our original analysis and summarizes some of the relevant data and the insights we have acquired over the past three decades.

The project that produced LTG took place in the System Dynamics Group of the Sloan School of Management within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1970 to 1972. Our project team used system dynamics theory and computer modeling to analyze the long-term causes and consequences of growth in the worlds population and material economy. We addressed questions such as: Are current policies leading to a sustainable future or to collapse? What can be done to create a human economy that provides sufficiently for all?

We had been commissioned to examine these questions by the Club of Rome, an informal, international group of distinguished businessmen, statesmen, and scientists. The Volkswagen Foundation in Germany provided the funding for our work.

Dennis Meadows, then on the faculty at MIT, assembled and directed the following project team, which spent two years conducting the original study.

A major foundation of our project was the World3 computer model, which we constructed to help us integrate data and theories related to growth. With the model we can produce scenarios of world development that are internally consistent. In the first edition of LTG we published and analyzed 12 scenarios from World3 that showed different possible patterns of world development over the two centuries from 1900 to 2100.