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The Politics of Improving Urban Air Quality
Article
A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth
Posted Oct 6, 2009 by Bill McKibben
[Excerpt] It has been more than 30 years since a groundbreaking book predicted that if growth continued unchecked, the Earth’s ecological systems would be overwhelmed within a century. The latest study from an international team of scientists should serve as an eleventh-hour warning that cannot be ignored.
Let’s play doctor. I’m sitting there in a white coat looking at my clipboard and I say: “Hmmm, your cholesterol is going up. If you keep eating this way, you’re going to have a heart attack some day.” You hear that, and you stop on the way home for a bacon double cheeseburger.
But now imagine I’m sitting there in my white coat looking at my clipboard and all of a sudden I whistle, and say: “Your cholesterol is off the charts, man. You’re in the zone where people have heart attacks all the time. You better hope you get it down before the stroke.” You hear that, and you stop on the way home for some Lipitor and a pair of running shoes.
We’ve known for a very long time now that, in some vague way, we were headed for trouble. Limits to Growth was published in 1972, and its assorted charts and graphs made remarkably clear that, as the authors of that seminal book put it at the time, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
But “the next hundred years” must have seemed a comfortingly long time, because — though Limits to Growth was the biggest-selling environmental book of all time, with 30 million copies sold — it wasn’t enough to divert our trajectory.
I thought of Limits to Growth last week, when Nature published a lead article by a large and illustrious team headed by the Stockholm scientist People convinced themselves the limits to growth were far enough away they’d be someone else’s problem. Johan Rockstrom. Titled “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” it set boundaries for nine interlinked planetary thresholds, arguing that if we crossed them we risked destroying the “unusual stability” that has marked the Holocene, which is the name scientists use for the last 10,000 years, the period when civilization arose...
Originally published October 1, 2009 in Yale Environment 360.
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
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5 comments
On Mice Problems
From: Tod Brilliant, Jan 4, 10 04:11 PM
WD -
Wow. Wow. What a darkly powerful recounting of your experience. And, I have to say that I agree completely with your final assessment.
unlimited poulation growth on limited resources
From: W D Hunt, Jan 3, 10 01:31 AM
We had a mouse plauge a few years ago here on the farm. We had all our seed grain stored in the barn, where we couldn't stop mice from getting in. There had always been a few mice, but the cold weather usually killed them off, but this year the winter was dry and mild, with a lot of grain spilled on the ground, so there were a lot of mice going in to the summer.
It was mouse heaven. The numbers seemed managable at first, and we put poison around and bombed them with phostoxin gas, but as fast as we killed them off they came in out of the cold from the fields. They ate holes in the bottom of every sack of grain, then crawled through the spilt grain and fouled it, all over it. The stink was indescribable. First, the horrible stale urine mouse stink then as the population became too much for their environment to support, the death stench, then they started eating each other. All the dead mice had bits missing out of them where their mates were using them for a bit of a snack, and then they started killing each other and eating the baby ones.There were a few old sheets of corrugated iron along one wall and you'd put your hand on it because you could see the iron shivering and shaking and it’d be warm. Really warm. and you'd tip the bit of iron over, and the floor would move with this molten grey mass that would dissipate, like a living river of grey fur. And the numbers built up and up, then one day, I went into the barn to spread poison around, and there was nothing, hardly a live mouse to be seen anywhere.
One or two at the most.
They must have come in late, I don't know.
Nothing but just stink and dead mice everywhere.
An unforgettable stench, from their putrefying nauseating and disgusting puffed up bloated maggoty little stinking bodies.
They died. I don't know why, they just died.
They didn't taper off nicely, or plateau out or stabilize at a sustainable level.
They just died.
No, it was more than that.
It was total collapse. They crashed. But I've seen what happens when a population puts an unsustainable pressure on the resource they rely on to keep them alive.
And the thing is that is really important, there was nothing I could have done in that barn that would have done any different than delay the inevitable.
The only way I could have controlled it was to control the food source or the population growth.
What happened to the mice in the end was inevitable. I like to think we are a bit different, but I'm really not sure
Euphemism delusion
From: Roy, Dec 31, 09 12:48 PM
@Denis Frith: Is not the "lack of understanding" that results from "belief in the limits to growth paradigm" dwarfed by the near-universal use of the term "growth"?
Isn't "growth" in this sense derived from economics rather than horticulture?
Wasn't "growth" the Euphemism of the 20th Century, intended to get us Homo sapiens to accept endless, cancer-like consumption of our host's resources?
Hasn't "growth" instead signaled the obsessive conversion of non-renewable resources into developing-world wastelands and sprawling suburbs populated by single-occupant vehicles?
If our actions cannot help but reflect our thoughts, isn't it time we adopted a new term to replace "growth"? Such as "proliferation"? "spread"? "toxicogenesis"?
Limits to Growth delusion
From: Denis Frith, Dec 28, 09 05:12 PM
The world model in 'Limits to Growth' predicted a peak population and the decline because of running out of the resources civilization was consuming. That is, the shortage of resources caused the cessation of growth. The global population could well stop growing yet the basic problem, the shortage of resources, will just get worse. Belief in the limits to growth paradigm means lack of the understanding necessary to cope with the inevitable powering down.
Limts
From: bobby g hunt, Dec 28, 09 08:41 AM
If common sense were common then everyone would have it. But its not. Yes, there are indeed limits and if not physical then by sense. Our present problems come from reinventing the wheel. When an idea or institution has become obsolete mass manufacture of it will only guarantee continued failure. The Christ spoke of renewing our minds, then why not our institutions? Are they not extensions of our thinking? We as a nation are so hung on fighting someone that we for the most succeed in beating the hell out of ourselves. I would think this needs to stop right away.