Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
on the functional boundaries— or limits— of the world's interrelated
large-scale systems. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and led by
one of Forrester's students, Dennis Meadows, the
Limits
group set out to
examine the “five basic factors that determine, and therefore, ultimately
limit, growth on this planet— population, agricultural production, natural
resources, industrial production, and pollution.”
12
Meadows and company
used a computer model very similar to Forrester's World 2 to demonstrate
the liabilities of continuous demographic, economic, industrial, and agri-
cultural expansion.
13
The world, the Meadows group argued, would soon
be “faced with an inevitable transition from world-wide growth to global
ecological equilibrium.”
14
Without a large-scale collective effort to curb
growth intentionally, this transition would occur on its own— abruptly
and catastrophically— sometime in the coming century. Released a month
before the Stockholm Conference, the published book sold more than
seven million copies in thirty languages, and it became a mainstay of popu-
lar environmentalism, both in the United States and abroad.
15
The Limits to Growth
described geographically discrete problems like
soil depletion, mineral resource shortages, pesticide use, air and water pol-
lution, overfishing, population growth, and nuclear waste in terms of a
single, interdependent world system, but the study paid only cursory atten-
tion to the global atmosphere.
16
The Keeling Curve set within an exponen-
tial curve of atmospheric CO
2
rise was apparently all the topic's authors
thought they needed to reinterpret CO
2
in terms of the
monde problèma-
tique.
That was not the end of their interest in CO
2
, however. Concurrent
with their work on
The Limits to Growth,
several Club of Rome members
and consultants took a keen interest in problems of the atmosphere. In
particular, Carroll Wilson of MIT's Sloan School of Management, former
chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, recognized that atmospheric
scientists' previous success in using models to analyze and predict the
behavior of nonlinear feedback loops operating at local, regional, and
global levels helped validate the Club of Rome's holistic approach. What
systems dynamicists sought to do with the earth's environmental, social,
economic, and political systems more generally, atmospheric scientists had
already begun to accomplish with the earth's climate. Weather forecasting,
after all, was the first use to which the first computers were put. Atmo-
spheric science was the original systems science.
17
Between 1970 and 1972,
while
The Limits to Growth
was still in gestation, Wilson teamed up with
