Limits to Growth

My edition of Limits to Growth has a 2020 preface written for a new printing of the 30-Year Update that followed the 20-Year Update of the 1972 original publication. And here we are, 52 years after that moment, where a group of young enthusiastic scientists and system thinkers handed out their meticulously researched and built predictions to politicians and policy makers worldwide. I heard on a podcast about how optimistic they were and I can't stop thinking about. They had computed realistic numbers that prove that our economies and societies are operating in overshoot mode. Exploiting and polluting the sources and sinks of our environment. They were convinced showing those graphs to the right people would results in an awakening and a sustainability revolution. And here we are, more than half a decade later ...

A classic! Indirectly demonstrating how bad humanity is at long-term planning when they have short-term gains on their minds. And yet, the writing is still positive. A chapter is dedicated to the Ozone Story, as encouraging example of the world collaborating to remove chemicals damaging our world. The story includes a twenty year delay between the initial warnings-calls and world-wide applied restriction laws. And yet we're still decades out from the damage on the ozone layer being unmade.

Humans and the planet run on different time scales. We fail at the delay parameters. We're slow at making decisions. We're slow at implementing efficient technologies world-wide. And we're too ignorant to understand that the earth will make us repay our sins for decades and centuries to come.