Título: LIMITS TO GROWTH. THE 30-YEAR UPDATE
Autor: MEADOWS, DONELLA H.; et al.
Año: 2004
Género: POLÍTICA MUNDIAL
Formato: EPUB
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. Preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in «The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update». The original book «Limits to Growth» concluded that: “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.”
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, this book 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.
“Thirty years have proven this model prophetic; now, in its newest iteration, we get one last challenge. May we pay more careful attention than in the past! We owe a great debt to the authors, including the late Donella Meadows, for whom this volume will serve as one of many fitting epitaphs.”
–Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature
“Reading the 30-year update reminds me of why the systems approach to thinking about our future is not only valuable, but indispensable. Thirty years ago, it was easy for the critics to dismiss the limits to growth. But in today's world, with its collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, falling water tables, dying coral reefs, expanding deserts, eroding soils, rising temperatures, and disappearing species, it is not so easy to do so. We are all indebted to the Limits team for reminding us again that time is running out.”
–Lester Brown, President, Earth Policy Institute
“Thirty years ago, The «Limits to Growth» was widely but erroneously attacked for prophesying doom, ignoring price, and denying adaptation. Today, with the global dynamics and challenges it foresaw now obvious to all, and the reforms it urged more vital than ever, its timely update remains an exceptionally valuable tool for understanding the unfolding future and creating the kind of future we want. Is there intelligent life on Earth? Work like this suggests grounds for cautious optimism.”
–Amory B. Lovins, CEO, Rocky Mountain Institute
What the authors said in 1972:
“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 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
How the critics responded:
“With current and near current technology, we can support 15 billion people in the world at twenty thousand dollars per capita for a millennium-and that seems to be a very conservative statement.”
–Herman Kahn
“The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.”
–Julian Simon
The emerging consensus today:
“Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.”
–World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, signed by more than 1,600 scientists, including 102 Nobel laureates, from 70 countries
 |  |