This week’s New Scientist (dated 7 January) has a rather worrying article reviewing the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, 40 years on. (The article is behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it.)

The Limits to Growth was much reviled at the time for being far too pessimistic. But if the article is correct in it’s assertions then Limits was also pretty close to the truth and the chickens are now coming home to roost — probably before we have time to wake up and smell the coffee let alone finish building the chicken coop.

Very broadly Limits, and the article, support my contention that everything needs to be reorganised, reduced and managed — and unless we do so PDQ we’re doomed. But then it appears we may be doomed anyway.

Here are a few key extracts from the New Scientist article…

[S]imulations, far from showing growth continuing forever, or even levelling out, suggested that it was most likely that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation.

[I]t is widely believed that Limits predicted collapse by 2000, yet in fact it made no such claim […] Now, with peak oil, climate change and the failure of conventional economics, there is a renewed interest.

World3 […] took what was known about the global population, industry and resources from 1900 to 1972 and used it to develop a set of equations describing how these parameters affected each other. Based on various adjustable assumptions, such as the amount of non-renewable resources, the model projected what would happen over the next century.

Assuming that business continued as usual, World3 projected that population and industry would grow exponentially at first. Eventually, however, growth would begin to slow and would soon stop altogether as resources grew scarce, pollution soared and food became limited […] [T]he human ecological footprint cannot continue to grow indefinitely.

If present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will he reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a sudden and rather uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity […]

More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production […] [I]n the real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed […] The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged […] they carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain.

[W]here growth of population and industry were constrained, growth did level out rather than collapse […]

In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy — which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials — and a doubling in the reserves of non-renewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reductions were added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding in higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck […] Whatever the researchers did to eke out resources or stave off pollution, exponential growth was simply prolonged, until it eventually swamped the remedies. Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise […]

[I]n 2008 […] a detailed statistical analysis of how real growth compares to the scenarios in Limits […] concluded that reality so far closely matches the standard run of World3.

Limits took account of the fact that birth rates fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected [but an] updated study using World3 in 2005 […] included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed.

Bit of a bummer really. But nothing that surprises me. Still it’s depressing if you believe it. And there seems to be little we can do about it at a personal level other than consume less, breed less, be much more eco-minded and keep shouting at those we invest with power. But that’s only any good if we all — or at least a large enough percentage of us — do it. And so far we seem to be emulating ostriches. Although maybe, just maybe, the current recession and international financial chaos might be the wake-up call and our saviour. I ain’t holding my breath though.

But then I likely won’t be around to see (the worst of) what’s to come. It’s the rest of you — our children’s and grand-children’s generations — I feel sorry for because it’s our and our parents’ generations who have buggered it up for you.

Bad karma all round. 🙁