18 NEWSWEEK.COM FEBRUARY 28, 2020
years ago it might have been reasonable to fear that because of our bottomless desire for growth, we humour planet bare and poison it with ans were going to strip ECONOMICS
taking better care of the planet we all live on. Weffectively meeting these challenges. The bad news good news is that we now know the playbook for of which global warming is the most pressing. The is that we’re not doing a great job of following that still face real challenges now and in the years ahead, ulation and prosperity while also that we can increase humpast half-century has shown us pollution. But not anymore. The an pop-e
playbook at present. We have to do better. We have to get smarter about meeting the problems we face.Earth Day because of how we were treating our world. It’s easy to see why they were so concerned. The 20th century, and in particular the post-war decades, witnessed by far the fastest growth in hu-man history. Around the world, populations grew In 1970, people took to the streets on the firstmore quickly than ever before, and economies grew even faster as people strove for a higher standard of living. Unfortunately, it seemed that along with this growth came three side effects, all of which were both inevitable and terrible.sources at an ever-faster clip. In the U.S., for exam-ple, consumption of aluminum, fertilizer and other important materials was growing even more quickly than the overall economy was in the years leading First, we were using up the earth’s natural re-
At MIT, a team led by biophysicist Donella Meadows trend. If it continued, disaster seemed unavoidable. up to Earth Day. On a finite planet, this was a scary built a computer simulation of the global economy and used it to run scenarios about how the future would unfold. Their conclusions, published in the 1972 bestseller assumption of no major change in the present sys-can thus say with some confidence that, under the tem, population and industrial growth will certainly The Limits to Growth, were stark: “We
stop within the [twenty-first] century, at the latest. The system...collapses because of a resource crisis.”The second bad side effect of growth was pol-lution. Air, water and land were all getting steadily dirtier in the years leading up to Earth Day. Levels of at-mospheric sulfur dioxide in the U.S. increased by more than 60 percent in the three decades after 1940, and in 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught
seemed no end in sight to the pollu-mtion. lution....By 1985, air pollution will to wear gas masks to survive air pol-that “Scientists have solid experi-fire in downtown Cleveland. There In a decade, urban dwellers will have support...the following predictions: have reduced the amount of sunlight ental and theoretical evidence to Life magazine reported in 1970
reaching earth by one half.”of creatures that we share the planet with. The passenger pigeon showed that even huge numbers provided no guarantee of survival. It was an abundant bird early in the nineteenth cen-tury, yet gone by 1914. Animals from of constant growth was extinction The third negative consequence - ) 520 /() 7 %( 770 $ 11 ʔ*( 77 < ' 8 $^1 (+^2 :(//ʔ^7 +('(^19 (^5 ^3267 ʔ*(^77 <