Future directions: Ecology or technology? 203scientists, and thinkers applauded Donella Meadows and her colleagues for caring deeply enough
about the planet to initiate an urgent discussion on its future. Inspired by the book, President
Jimmy Carter supported energy conservation, resource management, and social values over
material gain, but his policies posed a threat to corporate America and he lost his bid for a second
term in oice to Ronald Reagan, who went on to implement a program of widespread tax cuts,
decreased social spending, increased military spending, and deregulation of domestic markets.
5 Translated into 26 languages, he Limits to Growth became the all-time best-selling book on
environment issues. In addition to bringing the notion of sustainability to the forefront of
environmental consciousness, he Limits to Growth earned Donella Meadows, a Pulitzer Prize–
nominated author and respected scientist, the No. 3 spot on the (En)Rich List of top sustainability
thinkers. he Limits to Growth was updated in 1992, the year of the Rio global summit on environ-
ment and development; ater two decades, the team’s only revision was their observation that
“humanity had already overshot the limits of Earth’s support capacity.” In 2004, three years ater
Donella Meadows’s sudden death, a 30-year update was published with the purpose of restating
the original argument for a new generation, showing what had actually occurred since 1972, and
inspiring widespread action. heir conclusions, again, were unaltered.
6 At the core of he Limits to Growth are the concepts of overshoot and sustainability. Over-
shoot happens when a course of action goes too far and exceeds its physical limits. Imagine what
would happen if you drank too much alcohol, or if a timber company practiced clear-cut logging.
Common sense tells us that we cannot drink excessively without passing out, getting sick, and
ending up with a horrendous hangover, and that we cannot cut down a forest without decimating
the ecosystem. On a larger scale, overshoot is the result of rapid, uncontrolled growth, and when
no one pays attention to or responds to the problem, coupled with the lack of accurate data and
the persistent belief that there is no tomorrow, the consequences of overshoot are collapse. Over-
shoot can be compared to the bubble that occurs on the stock market when irrational exuberance
for a particular stock, such as dot.com companies at the turn of this century, inlates prices until
the bubble bursts and the market crashes.
7 he Limits to Growth identiies the growth of the global population and the material econ-
omy as exerting the highest demand on Earth’s inite resources. Of particular concern is exponen-
tial growth, which occurs when something doubles and redoubles. Yeast, for example, multiplies
exponentially. In 1650, it took 240 years for the global population of 0.5 billion to double; in 1965,
it took only 36 years for the global population to increase from 3.3 billion to 6.13 billion. In 1950,
the population of Nigeria was 36 million; in 2000, a mere 50 years later, it had more than tripled
to 125 million. Although global birth rates (the ratio of births compared to population) have been
decreasing slightly and women are bearing fewer children, when the global population numbers
7.1 billion (as of this writing), fewer women giving birth still incrementally produces a lot of
people.
8 More people require more food, but only so much agricultural land is available to grow it. To
produce more goods for more people, more resources are consumed, but resources come in lim-
ited supply. Since the late 1980s, more nonrenewable resources have been consumed on a yearly
basis than can be generated within the same year, and renewable resources have not been pro-
duced fast enough to replace them. More people and the consumption of more resources generate
more pollution and waste, but the planet’s sinks can absorb waste only so fast without overlow-
ing. At the turn of the millennium, humanity had already overshot the planet’s limits by 20
percent.
9 he alternative to overshoot is sustainability, irst deined by the 1987 Brundtland Commis-
sion as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.” According to economist Herman Daly, sustainability
can be achieved by meeting three widely acknowledged conditions: