'The Limits to Growth': A Book That Launched a Movement

Christian Parenti

December 5, 2012

In the spring of 1972, a slim book called The Limits to Growth dropped like an intellectual bomb on the developed world’s most optimistic assumptions about itself. Peppered with computer-generated graphs and written in clear, dispassionate language by a team of MIT graduate students led by two young scholars, Dennis and Donella Meadows, the book delivered a seemingly extreme argument, which ran as follows: If 1970 rates of economic growth, resource use and pollution continued unchanged, then modern civilization would face environmental and economic collapse sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. Yes, collapse—as in massive human die-offs.

It was a message that many people in the industrialized world already seemed to feel intuitively. They could see it—or thought they could—in the ever-faster pace of change embodied in highways, smog, telecommunications, jet travel, tasteless frozen TV dinners, urban riots, youth rebellion, and the bloody spectacle of a high-tech military fighting low-tech guerrillas in Vietnam. For many people, the world was moving too fast and in the wrong direction, and The Limits to Growth seemed to prove that point scientifically.