in 2002 they published A Synopsis: Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. I haven't read the original yet so I can only comment on the more recent document in detail. It is now 40 years since the original book and just last week I came across an interview with Dennis Meadows last week titled 'Is it too late for sustainable development?'.
No wonder he feels jaded, having suffered the fate (one that many scientists can relate to) of doing some important work that then largely went ignored. It just shows how important effective communication is! His book was quite a success; but only some people read books, and only a subset of those read non-fiction books, and only a few on this topic. Many different mediums would yield wider exposure, and now we have 21st century communication as another string in the bow. Social media has released creativity, and so now we get things like this video, which combine the appreciation of rap with economic theory:
Back to the topic...
Scientists are still not giving up though; very recently, thousands of them met in London for the first Planet under Pressure conference, where they came up with the first State of the Planet Declaration. Serious stuff!
Soon we have the Rio+20 meeting coming up. In the lead up, many famous experts are making comments to stimulate the sense of urgency to the leaders who will be discussing our biggest issues there. One of their latest is Our Scarcest Resource is Time. Featured on it is Lester Brown, and I came across a video of him speaking on the 40th anniversary of Limits to Growth where he shares his thoughts:
He speaks about how the combination of all the world's current issues is placing us on a knife edge where an even greater recession could be sparked at any time. I found his example of the Moscow heat wave in 2010 (40 million tons harvest grain lost) in comparison to a hypothetical Chicago heat wave scenario quite sobering (in short, it would be ~4x worse in regards to grain loss). Considering the grain market chaos we had with the former, the latter would be horrendous. The concept of politics of food scarcity (think: restricted imports/exports, land-grabs and manipulative leveraging by governments) makes me fear for my New Zealand (even though at this stage we are still so well off relative to most other countries!). In his opinion, the food economy is the most likely system to break since farmers are dealing with the perfect storm of water shortage (as we are living in demand overshoot), climate change, and unsustainable agriculture methods. The reason it is so dangerous is because "one of the things people expect of their government is food security, if they do not supply this then they lose their legitimacy and this becomes a major source of instability of failing states". He mentions Plan B, which he developed through his Earth Policy Institute, as involving: the cutting of carbon emissions by 80% by 2020 (and he gives some good examples), stabilizing the population at 8 billion by filling the last family planning gaps, eradication of poverty (closely linked to population stabilization), and restoring the natural support systems of earth (e.g. forests, soils, fisheries, etc). He has calculated that doing the last three of these would cost $200b/yr and makes reference to the US military budget of $700b/yr saying "we can avoid the collapse if we want to" if we redefine security from its previous century definition (i.e. war-focussed) to our current principal threats that affect the global village and do what needs to be done to achieve the main objectives. In essence, this talk is simply another call for courageous leadership from the top.
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