{"id":66482,"date":"2024-01-19T07:16:18","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T12:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66482"},"modified":"2024-01-19T07:16:18","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T12:16:18","slug":"is-it-too-late-for-sustainable-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66482","title":{"rendered":"Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?<\/a><\/h3>\n

Dennis Meadows thinks so. Forty years after his book The Limits to Growth, he explains why<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"Dennis-Meadows-Limit-Growth-QA-631.jpg\"
Courtesy of Dennis Meadows<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On March 2, 1972, a team of experts from MIT presented a groundbreaking report called\u00a0The Limits to Growth\u00a0<\/em>to scientists, journalists and others assembled at the Smithsonian Castle. Released days later in book form, the study was one of the first to use computer modeling to address a centuries-old question: When will the population outgrow the planet and the natural resources it has to offer?<\/p>\n

The researchers, led by scientist Dennis Meadows, warned that if current trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continued, that dark time\u2014marked by a plummeting population, a contracting economy and environmental collapse\u2014would come within 100 years.<\/p>\n

In four decades,\u00a0The Limits to Growth<\/em>\u00a0has sold over ten million copies in more than 30 languages. The book is part of the canon of great environmental literature of the 20th century. Yet, the public has done little to avert the disaster it foretells.<\/p>\n

GRAPH:\u00a0Australian physicist Graham Turner shows how actual data from 1970 to 2000 almost exactly matches predictions set forth in the \u201cbusiness-as-usual\u201d scenario presented in<\/em>\u00a0The Limits to Growth.<\/a><\/p>\n

To mark the report\u2019s 40th anniversary, experts gathered in Washington, D.C. on March 1. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, two authors of\u00a0The Limits to Growth<\/em>, and other speakers discussed the challenges of forging ahead into a sustainable future at \u201cPerspectives on\u00a0Limits to Growth<\/em>: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet,\u201d a\u00a0symposium<\/a>\u00a0hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Club of Rome, the global think tank that sponsored the original report.<\/p>\n

I spoke with Meadows, who retired in 2004 after 35 years as a professor at MIT, Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire. We discussed the report and why he feels it is too late for sustainable development and it is now time for resilience.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development? Dennis Meadows thinks so. Forty years after his book The Limits to Growth, he explains why Courtesy of Dennis Meadows On March 2, 1972, a team of experts from MIT presented a groundbreaking report called\u00a0The Limits to Growth\u00a0to scientists, journalists and others assembled at the Smithsonian Castle. Released […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[7777,150,8431,34077,680,34078,769,32909],"class_list":["post-66482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-club-of-rome","tag-collapse","tag-dennis-meadows","tag-megan-gambino","tag-resilience","tag-smithsonian-institution","tag-sustainability","tag-the-limits-to-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66483,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66482\/revisions\/66483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}