Interview With Dennis Meadows, From Limits to Growth Fame

Here is an interesting take on resiliency from one of the pioneers of the limits to growth and sustainability. Enjoy the audio and transcript here. A small snippet below from the website Peak Prosperity.

Chris Martenson:     Well, thank you for that. Dennis, for our listeners, can you please summarize The Limits to Growth. What is it?

Dennis Meadows:      In the early ‘70s, a group called the Club of Rome, which is an international network of mainly corporate leaders, became concerned about the interconnection of emerging problems, and out of their conversations evolved finally a project at MIT, which I directed over a course of two years.

We gathered available data going back to the year 1900 to create a computer simulation model showing the interaction between population, economic capital, and environmental resources, and used it to project out to 2100 under a bunch of different assumptions, assumptions about social change, technical change, and so forth.

And the basic conclusion was that if the policies which were then in force and which had produced enormous growth in in welfare around the world by early ‘70s, if those were continued, we would see further growth through maybe 2020, and then the physical realities would start to impress themselves and there would be decline.

We knew it was impossible to make predictions precisely because so much of this depends on political responses, so we developed a set of thirteen different scenarios, some of which showed sustainable development, most of which showed what we would loosely term overshooting decline. And it’s the overshooting decline scenario which is our standard – was standard at that time – and actually has been borne out. We're clearly now just beginning the decline phase.

Chris Martenson:     So let’s talk about overshoot really quickly. I noticed in your book, in Limits to Growth and the update, you also talk about the three causes of overshoot. If we could just define overshoot for people so we're all on the same page, please.

Dennis Meadows:      Overshoot refers to a concept of carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the rather loosely defined concept of how much a population can be supported on a given ecosystem. So in our case, it comes down to sort of how much population and material wellbeing can be sustained a planet earth given its stock of resources and its natural regenerative possibilities.

This is a concept which is not very well defined. It’s subject to a lot of debate. But I think there's pretty good consensus that the current population, and certainly the current material wellbeing, are far above what could be sustained.

So, as a consequence, it’s kind of like if you have a bank account, for a short period you can spend a lot more from the bank than you're putting into it as you draw down your reserves. But at some point, you deplete your reserves, and then your spending has to go into a decline. And in a very crude way that’s what we're looking at.

In our case, spending is things like energy use, food consumption, fresh water, and so forth.