Almost half a century ago, in 1968, Aurelio Peccei convened for the first time the group that was later to be known as the “Club of Rome”. The aim of the group was not what the Club was to become known for, “The Limits to Growth”. At that time, the concept of limits was vague and scarcely understood and the interest of the members was, rather, in an equitable distribution of the resources of the Earth. What moved Aurelio Peccei was the attempt to fight hunger, poverty, and injustice.
That approach led the Club to commission a report on the world’s resources and their limits to a group of researchers of the MIT. The result was the study for which the Club of Rome became known ever since: “The Limits to Growth,” published in 1972. From then on, the debate mostly moved on whether the scenarios of “The Limits to Growth” were correct and whether the study would really describe the possible trajectory of the world’s economy and its collapse as the result of the combination of persistent pollution and resource depletion. It soon degenerated into insults directed against “Cassandras” and “catastrophists.” Still today, it is widely believed that the study was “wrong”, even though it was not.
But world models were not so much what Peccei and the other founders had in mind. Their aim had remained the initial one: justice, social equality, freedom from want. The discovery of the world’s limits had made these objectives more difficult than they had seemed to be at the beginning, but not an impossible target. The “Limits” report, indeed, had sketched out how the world’s economy could be steered in such a way to avoid collapse and to maintain for a long time a reasonable level of production of goods and services per person.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
