Limits to Growth
Limits to Growth, a study of the patterns and dynamics of human presence on earth, pointed toward environmental and economic collapse within a century if "business as usual" continued. In 1972, the book's findings sparked a worldwide controversy about the earth's capacity to withstand constant human and economic expansion. More than 40 years later, with more than 10 million copies sold in 28 languages, this "little book with powerful ideas" endures as a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand the complex relationships underlying today's global environmental and economic trends.
Stats for nerds
19recommend
123mentions
78people
2008–2026years
23% recommend68% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ (https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses.
Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read.
But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
- I see a lot of people here are missing his "big deal" which he talks about in the end where he references the "Spaceship Earth" problem.
What I believe he is getting at is people are going to use LLMs to build systems at scale to further strip mine society.
The "Spaceship Earth" problem is a reference to Limits to Growth. For those who haven't read "Limits to Growth", and the more recent Re-calibration of Limits to Growth, I implore you to do so.
- If you read "Limits to Growth" as if it were some contemporary influencer or futurist's content, this might indeed be disappointing. But the truth is, "Limits to Growth" is one of the first attempt to articulate the fundamental limits to our strategy as a civilization. It is outlining how fundamentally flawed it is.
One might justifiably argue that the quantitative predictions made by the book hinder, or even compromise, the deeper, more important point of it. But the latter was unfortunately correct, and plenty of quantitative data are there to back it up: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8.
- Everyone needs to read The Limits to Growth and then come back to this piece for a laugh. Donella Meadows is far more profound and intelligent then the vast majority of non-system thinkers who stumbled into the halls of power.
- On sources: I'm highly partial to the work of William Ophuls who's been writing on this topic for a half century. His PhD thesis was published in 1977 as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (with an update in the early 1990s). That largely lays out the problematique, both in terms of resources and political dynamics. The book's old enough that many of its own projections can be tested, and I think these hold out exceptionally well, particularly in highlighting the (then future) rise of China as a global economic, political, and military force. Ophuls has gone on to suggest at least the framework of solutions, most especially in Plato's Revenge (2009), though that remains fairly high level. What really makes Ophuls's works tremendously valuable is his bibliographic notes which are comprehensive and, to use a favourite word of his, synoptic. The note for Ecology in particular covers much of the previous several decades' literature on growth and perspectives from both optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints, and Ophuls is exceedingly fair in considering both. I've gone back to many of those sources myself (Maddox, Kahn, Simon) to compare notes. I've actually typed out the note from Plato's Revenge, which captures a sense of his practice, though that focuses more on recent and political topics: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607050023/https://old.reddi...>. In that sense, Ophuls is an excellent entry point into the literature as a whole. He has a website at <http://www.ophuls.org/William_Ophuls/Home.html> though in various states of disrepair.
Ophuls's political-ecological approach is being carried on by Thomas Homer-Dixon: <https://homerdixon.com/writing/>
There are other authors: Bill McKibben's Eaarth (sic), Joel Magnusonn's The Approaching Great Transformation, the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, all of which I have to hand. Vaclav Smil has written his own damned library on resources and sustainability from a technical perspective, largely looking backwards though with some forward-looking elements. I particularly recommend Energy in World History (1992, 2019) and Energy and Civilization (2017). Energy Transitions (2016) tackles the specific question of converting to a sustainable-energy path: <Energy Transitions>. And there's a long list of other Smil publications.
Kate Rayworth's Doughnut Economics is another prescriptive work looking at ways forward. <https://www.kateraworth.com/>
The original Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens) remains relevant, and is freely available online: <https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-availabl...>. I strongly recommend reading primary sources over hot takes, interpretations, and commentaries. It's also helpful to remember that LtG served not as a prescription but as an alarm: there's a clear problem and we've got to wake up to it. Sadly, more than 50 years onward, that alarm continues to be ignored by many (including within this thread).
The now-defunct Worldwatch Institute published an annual State of the World publication which was an anthology of articles on sustainability generally, from 1984--2017, and give an excellent sense of the breadth and progress of thinking on these topics. Those are mostly available via the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/search?query=worldwatch+institute+state+...>
Worldwatch's founder, Lester R. Brown, has written numerous books, his latest covers this topic, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy <http://www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/market_forces_dri...>
Looking at the energy picture alone, there's David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which breaks down the technical picture, with a focus on Britain though applicable elsewhere, clearly and soberly. Freely available online: <http://www.withouthotair.com/>
That's just skimming the top of a huge literature. There are a tremendous number of different viewpoints, of topics and approaches, and of course disagreement. Contrary to the assertions of some, however, there are specific and actionable recommendations to be found. Looking into the bibliographies and notes of the works listed should launch you further in whatever direction you care to explore.
- This "systems phenomenon" — where governments are mostly constrained to act against our ecologically-enlightened self-interest — is brilliantly described by the lead author of Limits to Growth.
