Editor’s note: Collapse is not just coming; it is already here. Wildlife populations are collapsing, from oceanic fish to birds to amphibians to plankton. The climate system is breaking down. Glaciers and ice sheets are collapsing. Dead zones are proliferating in the ocean. People in wealthy nations are only insulated from these realities because of massive energy inputs—mostly from fossil fuels.
These are predictable results. An unsustainable culture will destroy the planet, and then it will collapse. Each day, more forest is logged, more pollution emitted, and more water poisoned. It is a tautology, therefore, that the sooner collapse happens, the more of the natural world will remain.
Predictions of societal collapse have been made for decades, and while specifics often turn out to be wrong, the general trends are undeniable. Today’s article looks back at “Limits to Growth,” one of the first such studies.
By Kirkpatrick Sale / Counterpunch
Sometime in the 1960’s a group of prominent businessmen in Europe decided it was time to face up to the contradiction that lies at the heart of mode n capitalism: it is a system based on infinite growth in a world with finite limits to growth: in input (resources, including food), throughput (population), output (pollution), and a likely collapse if any one of these limits is exceeded. In 1968 they created an organization called the Club of Rom e , the task of which w as to examine what the prime leader of the group, veteran Italian businessman Aurelio Peccei, described quaintly in his 1970 book, The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Response to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.
Fifty years ago this spring the Club published a book called The Limits to Growth, based on a study using complex computer models by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Donnella Meadows and her husband Dennis, with a couple of MIT graduate students. It used advanced computers to chart out different scenarios, including one in which nothing is done and we continue heedless growth. Its conclusion was stark and simple:
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 in the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity, causing “overshoot and collapse” with a tipping point around 2020-30.
The book was a worldwide best-seller, but its conclusions were widely challenged and, in centers of political and economic power, mostly ignored. Growth is, after all, the lifeblood and raison d’etre of capitalism and the idea that there should be limits to it was so repugnant as to be essentially incomprehensible. A lot of people are making a lot of money, and a very few a very lot, so what would be the point in imagining that there would ever be an end to it?
And so the whole point of the Club of Rome’s efforts was shunted aside. It had wanted people to start rethinking the assumptions of capitalism, questioning where untrammeled growth was taking us, and reflect upon the new kind of world that computer technology with its immense (and basically uncontrolled) power was leading us to. And so capitalism became global capitalism, and then added computer capitalism and internet capitalism, and it continued to grow exponentially with no thoughts whatsoever to limits. It seemed as if there were something inherent in the computerized culture that demanded the growth-lovers would win out over the limits-warners.
A second study in 2000 confirmed that the original analysis found that nothing in the original thirty years earlier could be invalidated. “To the contrary,” said international banker Matthew Simmons, “the chilling warnings of how powerful exponential growth can be are right on track.” Only four years later the Meadows themselves came out with “The 30-Year Update,” holding that the original may have overemphasized resource depletion (fearing a coming “peak oil”) but underplayed pollution and the impact of greenhouse gasses, and nothing had been done on our path to overshoot. The growthists still ignored it and added cellphone capitalism and central bank appeasement into the mix in such a way that democratic control or restraint proved impossible.
A fourth study came in 2014 at the end of the Great Recession from University of Melbourne scholar Graham Turner who came to the conclusion that resource depletion, overpopulation, economic decline, industrial slowdown, and environmental collapse were following almost exactly the lines of the 1972 forecast—and leading straight to “overshoot and collapse” in 2020-30.
The most recent reassessment was in 2021 in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Yale scholar Gaya Harrington, who found that the original Limits to Growth scenarios, including the dangerous business-as-usual one, “aligned closely with observed global data,” and “this suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change its course.” As for business-as-usual, “Pursuing continuous growth is not possible.” She failed to add “without overshoot and collapse.”
And just a month ago Dennis Meadows, asked how he felt about his original work, said calmly that all analyses “have generally concluded that “the world is moving along what we termed the standard scenario” of growth. He was not sanguine about society doing anything about changing that and averting global tragedy. The human species, he said, puts a “high survival value in focusing on the short term nearby and not worrying about the long-term far away.” A few weeks after that the latest comprehensive UN climate change panel confirmed that, concluding that severe overheating of the world caused by greenhouse gases has already caused “widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure.”
So all of the proposed reforms and remedies offered up in “green new deals” and renewable energy panaceas anywhere to date are completely useless because they are not aimed at capitalism’s fatal commitment to growth that the Club of Rome had wanted the world to reconsider. And there is no sign anywhere that the nations of the world are willing to confront this fact and head toward any policy or proposal that would acknowledge that, much less doing anything to reverse it.
The inevitable result: “overshoot and collapse,” and not far off, either.
Unlimited growth is impossible. As Siddhartha taught, all things are finite. Any sane clear-thinking ten-year-old can understand this, but most humans are insane and/or brainwashed, so they argue about it. This problem goes back way before capitalism; it started with the human overpopulation that was caused by the use of agriculture, because human population has been increasing ever since as if that cancerous growth could go on forever.
However, it’s foolish to make specific predictions about things like the collapse of civilization or societies. Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was spot on, EXCEPT FOR HIS PREDICTIONS. Because of those incorrect predictions, people now argue that overpopulation isn’t a problem. Humans can never know enough or be smart enough to consider all the unknown variables that effect when civilization or societies will collapse due to endless consumption or endless population growth; we just know that the collapse is inevitable, and that all civilizations collapse eventually because civilization itself is not sustainable. (The proper standard is whether people are living in PROPER ECOLOGICAL BALANCE with the Earth, their ecosystems, and their habitats. Asking whether something is “sustainable” is just asking how much killing and destruction you can get away with without being killed yourself.)
We don’t need predictions. As the introduction here says, this stuff is already happening, just look around. Native forests, animals, and ecosystems down to less than 10% of their natural size, unnatural human pollution is everywhere, the oceans are being acidified by unnatural human emissions of carbon dioxide, humans are causing the atmosphere to unnaturally heat up, humans are causing the current extinction crisis, etc. We don’t need to argue about whether humans CAN destroy the Earth, they have already done so. Compare what the Earth looked like 10,000 years ago before people used agriculture to what it looks like now, and you’d think that you were looking at two different planets. Of course we should try to save and restore what we can, but things are very bad right now to put it mildly.
If our economic system were designed and run by anything other than humanoid parasites, the health of the economy would be measured not by how much crap we can imagine, produce, market, and throw into landfills industrially, but by how little we can produce to satisfy genuine needs naturally.
As is, the goal appears to be to use up the planet as quickly, wastefully, and poisonously as possible, while leaving behind the minimum number of living witnesses to our crimes.
Back to the subject of predictions, this one is neither an “if” nor a “when,” but a “how” — if and when it happens:
The U.N. recently said that civilization could collapse in the immediate future, and that the most likely cause (apart from nuclear war, which is always just a half hour away) would be simultaneous crop failures, in any six of the world’s ten leading grain producers.
And with war in eastern Europe virtually assuring crop failures this year in Russia and Ukraine, we find ourselves already a third of the way there, without even seeing what weather, wildfires, or other calamities might do for the proverbial (and literal) “price of rice.”
With a week of 110° temperatures in the first half of May, India has already banned wheat exports for the year. There are also production worries in China, Australia, and France, which bring us to that magic number of six — even before the start of the northern hemisphere’s summer.
In other words, there is already a real and plausible scenario for the collapse of civilization in 2022 — without even examining the potential for war between India and China (an annual worry), a heat wave in the North American grain belt, or some other imponderable, such as another blockage of the Suez Canal.
That’s how vulnerable a hungry world of 7.8 billion people is to imminent collapse — and how close we may already be to an apocalypse, any and every year, from now on.
We keep hearing that we’d better do something soon about the continuing rise of CO2 output. And yet we keep putting it off, setting target dates in the next decade, etc.
If the human race is at all serious about survival, governments would be doing things NOW — not just to produce more “green energy” by 2035, but to use less energy EVERY YEAR, to impose population limits on places that keep increasing human numbers, to stop building and “renewing” nuclear arsenals, and generally to understand and live within the limits nature has imposed upon a finite planet.
I saw the comment fairly early on in this article that said something like, the sooner the collapse happens (and that would seem to apply to crashing the human population) the more of the planet (and presumably other species) can be saved.
I think whether intentional or not (and it could be a intentional plan by the 1% but it also could just be human stupidity) there are going to be massive food shartages next year that have already begun. The drought is so bad in Iraq that the country is having to import rice to feed itself. All countries in the Middle East are struggling with drought, so is the Global South, so is Southern California. It was so bad that the World Food Progamme begged for 5.2 billion dollars extra for this last year. Then the Ukraine War happened Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of grain and cooking oil.
Many regions in the Middle East and Global South will NOT even attempt to plant crops this year. I recently watched an interview with the CEO of Goya foods that said that there was going to be severe food shortages this coming year but that the US wouldn’t starve itself, but the implication was that it would still be hard even for the US and that other countries would face severe famine.
So, is all of this good news or bad news in terms of the predictions made in the article?
I’m going to say that there are a lot better ways to deal with human overshoot than trying to speed up world wide food shortages. For example, wealthy countries encouraging smaller family size and providing free and easy to use birth control and abortion in its own country and as part of aid packages to poorer countries. But to make all of this even worse, US anti-abortionists are trying to ban all abortions and then seem to have the goal of banning birth control next. Thus, activists on the Center and Left are having to divert energy into protecting a right that all other wealthy countries give their citizens without a fight, the right for those with a uterus to choose what is inside their uterus.
So, I see the good news is that a sociopath (or more than one sociopath or perhaps dumb luck?) is trying to crash the human populatioon to save the planet while at the same time leaving the wealth and power of the 1% intact. But that is also the bad news too. Survivors of this nightmare will have to decide what to do with the sociopathic 1% if they planned this.
100% agreement with Silver Damsen. And when I suggested imposed population limits, I didn’t mean forced sterilizations, etc. I meant that the governments of countries with runaway populations (which is racially inclusive: white Turks, brown Filipinos, black Nigerians, etc.) must take measures to end population growth, or they will destroy themselves by inaction.
Two Indian states, for example, simply limited government jobs and loans to families with no more than two children, and population numbers there immediately stopped growing.
Population projections of continued growth (such as a tripling of Africans, and 750 million Nigerians by 2100) are projections of human insanity, and a birth mania that would doom most life in Africa, and send countless millions of starving people onto doomed migrations to Europe, Australia, and North America.
The same is true for continued growth in southern Asia, Central America, etc. When some Hebrew writer of antiquity inserted “be fruitful and multiply” into the Bible (along with numerous other religious writers, presuming to speak for their “gods”), they and their supposed deities failed to add caveats such as “for awhile,” “in times of war,” or “enough to offset infant and maternal mortality.”
Instead, human numbers are now roughly 46 times what they were 2000 years ago, and almost four times what they were in 1900. Being fruitful and multiplying is no longer a hedge against plague, pestilence, and war. Today, it is a prescription for plague, pestilence, war, mass extinction, and collective suicide.
It is going to take all people of goodwill raising a general strike worldwide, saying “No more!” to this elite neoliberal greed and victimizing of us commoners. Just refuse to cooperate with them!
Yes!
It is not just elite free market capitalists and neoliberals that are responsible for destroying the earth. It is also the doctrinaire socialists and marxists who completely agree with the industrial growth system…except they wanted the system run by
the workers or marxist bureaucrats. Even the left greens loved technology because they really believed this would help the poor and the workers and the oppressed. The irony is that today the race issue has replaced class issues and the left has been marginalized. They belittedl the environmentalists for decades and were clueless about the disastrous impact of industrialization. Politically they stayed away from electoral politics, public education, organizing, etc. They were arrogant and thought they had all the answers. Had they understood the environmental issues and principles and joined with the activists they might have had an effect. But they wanted people to follow THEM and had no interest in participating with the environmentalists because socialism was not in the cards. So I curse them and I curse BLM and Identity Politics for putting humans first, for trying to shame liberals into confessing their crimes, for dividing the progressives, for their insistence on the superiority of nonwhites, on their refusal to challenge overconsumption and overpopulation, and for spending time and energy attacking potential allies rather than corporations and racial demagogues. They are the ones who
prevented this country from unifying and challenging the industrial global growth system that is responseible for human
deprivation.