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| View Larger Image | Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
| | List Price: | $22.50 | | Price: | $15.30 | | You Save: | $7.20 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 29157 | | Studio: | Chelsea Green | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 368 | | Publication Date: | June 01, 2004 | | Publisher: | Chelsea Green |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.
Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognized for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.
In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.
Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 18 reviews)
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Supplies of vital resources today are NOT adequate for sustainability 
I read today yet another reassuring news article saying that supplies of crude oil and other vital resources are just fine, no reason to worry. "Limits to Growth" shows that's just not true. Supplies may be adequate for today's needs--but with human population growing all the time, pollution adding up, and soil fertility declining, that can change very fast. In fact, a serious economic collapse is very likely in the next twenty years unless humanity changes course.
Environmental economics has been an interest of mine for years. I didn't bother to read this book when it came out, figuring that it would have little that I didn't already know. Reading it now, I found that "Limits to Growth" is a fantastic book explaining the economics of sustainability. I recommend it to everyone. Mainstream economists in particular--even if you disagree, you owe it to society to read this book. If you think the authors got it wrong, please explain what variables their computer model missed and why. I actually felt that for many of their variables, the authors' assumptions were, if anything, overly optimistic.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"In most World3 runs . . . the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope. . . .[Problem-solving capabilities] can process and handle just so much. when problems arise exponentially and in multiples, problems that could theoretically be dealt with one by one can overwhelm the ability to cope."
"To be materially and energetically sustainable, the economy's throughputs would have to meet Herman Daly's three conditions: Its rates of use of renewable resources do not exceed their rates of regeneration. Its rates of use of nonrenewable resources do not exceed the rate at which sustainable renewable substitues are developed. Its rates of pollution emission do not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment."
"Because of delays in the feedback from limits, the global economic system is likely to overshoot its sustainable levels. Indeed, for many sources and sinks important to the world economy, overshoot has already occurred. Technology and markets operate only on imperfect information and with delay. Thus, they can enhance the economy's tendency to overshoot."
The book does have a few things I don't agree with. The authors describe nitrogen pollution from fertilizer drainage off agricultural land as too dispersed to be reduced by ordinary pollution controls. This is simply not the case. Fertilizer is as much a point source pollution as any. The point is simply the nozzle filling the fertilizer container at the factory. This is the point at which fertilizer releases must be controlled. Fertilizer releases should be considered under law as if they are released into the environment at the nozzle point, because in effect they are.
August 01, 2008 | |
Excelent book
This bool presents a complete and understandable foresight of what will happen with our planet if we don't care about the way we are using it. I really recomend that book for everbody.
June 15, 2008 | |
Our future depends on understanding rhis book
I see this book is ranked #31,103 in Books on Amazon and it only has 15 reviews. This tells me everything I need to know about our future. We are doomed to a future of the worst case scenarios. This can be concisely summarized as overshoot and dieoff. If you haven't read this book go ahead, but it is very unlikely the human race will manage to follow a sustainable course. You will just have a better understanding why things are going haywire.
March 29, 2008 | |
Serious critique of contemporary technological society
This book is neither easy nor pleasant reading. However, it is not the purely pessimistic voice of doom or the rabid environmentalist tract that many reviews described when the first edition came out 30 years ago. Rather, it is a sort of cross between a primer on budgeting and the warning a doctor might give to an overweight smoker. A good budget rests on a few simple assumptions: Resources are limited; you must plan for the future; and if you overspend now, you'll run short later. A doctor's report would say, "You may not have symptoms now, but your habits will eventually cause your body to break down." Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows present such a warning to all of human civilization. They analyze resource consumption, economic distribution, population growth and pollution. Their sobering conclusions amount to an attempt to start humanity on the road to a more equitable, sustainable society. The effort required to read this book comes in part from the writing, which varies drastically in style, tone and organizational choices, and in part from the innate challenges of the material. That said, we recommend it to anyone who wishes to plan realistically for the future, whether you're a CEO who wants to do sustainable business, a national leader who wants to create thriving human institutions, a community member concerned about local pollution, or a parent who does not want his or her children to grow up in a wasteland.
November 01, 2007 | |
Essential reading, but only part of the story 
No one likes limits, but they're with us all our lives, from the restrictions our parents place on us as children to the limits that society and Mother Nature compel us to adhere to as adults. The authors do a clear and thorough job of explaining how physical limits affect the Earth and the human society evolving within it.
Updating their mathematical model and learning from three decades of experience since the original 1972 study, the authors reinforce their earlier finding that persistently overshooting the Earth's carrying capacity could lead to any one of a variety of unhappy scenarios for humanity. While expressing due respect for technology development and the effects of free markets, they emphasize that these are necessary but not sufficient tools for getting us through the 21st century.
The authors have been criticized as doomsayers whose predictions have proven wrong. Such criticism obviously has come from people who have not actually read their work. They have not produced just a single computer run of their model and then proclaimed, "This is what will happen." They have done hundreds of runs to attempt to illustrate how important variables - such as population growth, industrial production, technological development, and pollution - interact to shape future scenarios in a 100-year timeframe. A thorough reading of this book demonstrates that rather than being disproven, their original scenarios are looking ominously accurate.
Chapter 5 is the book's good-news story, providing a case study on how the world got together to tackle the ozone depletion problem over the last quarter century. This and the final two chapters demonstrate that the authors have not given in to hopelessness.
The most critical shortcoming of the authors' work is one they clearly acknowledge. They address flows of population, materials, energy, and emissions that can be mathematically modeled, but do not include factors such as military conflict, large-scale corruption, natural disasters, pandemics, or severe economic stresses like currency and debt crises. If these things are taken into account, one could view the Limits to Growth model as wildly optimistic. What would this study look like with a non-quantitative social futurist perspective added to it?
The authors have done a remarkable job of clearly explaining concepts such as positive and negative feedback loops and the Earth's sources and sinks as they apply to the model. But the 284 pages of text may be more than can be absorbed and digested by the wider audience this book deserves. Perhaps a condensed version is needed, one that captures the message and its urgency but is short enough to get even policy-makers to read it.
August 12, 2007 | |
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