The Worst Is Yet to Be?

The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips, backyards and outlying fields, hoping to raise a subsistence crop. London's offices are dark, its docks deserted. In the farm lands of the Ukraine, abandoned tractors litter the fields: there is no fuel for them. The waters of the Rhine, Nile and Yellow rivers reek with pollutants.

Fantastic? No, only grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and "progress." At least that is the vision conjured by an elaborate study entitled The Limits to Growth. Its sponsors are no latter-day Jeremiahs, but the 70 eminently respectable members of the prestigious Club of Rome. These include Aurelio Peccei, the Italian economist (and former Olivetti chief) who now heads the management firm of Italconsult in Rome; Kogoro Uemura, president of the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations; and Britain's Alexander King, director general for scientific affairs of the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development. It is as if David Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Buckminster Fuller suddenly came out against commerce and technology.

The club was founded by Peccei back in 1968 with the avowed purpose of exploring the large issues confronting society. "We needed something to make mankind's predicament more visible, more easy to grasp," says Peccei. To that end, the Volkswagen Foundation granted the club $250,000 in 1970. Peccei turned to an international team of scientists led by M.I.T. Computer Expert Dennis Meadows and told them to study the most basic issue of all--survival.

Meadows, 29, had studied the new field of "systems dynamics." His mentor was M.I.T. Professor Jay Forrester, the brilliant developer of a computer model that could simulate the major ecological forces at work in the world today. Forrester's model begins with the recognition that all these factors are interlocked. Human population cannot grow without food for sustenance. Since just about all the globe's best land is already under cultivation, farm production can rise only through use of tractors, fertilizers, pesticides --all products of industry. But more industrial output not only demands a heavier drain on natural resources that are scarce even now; it also creates more pollution. And pollution ultimately interferes with the growth of both population and food.

Using this model, Meadows and his team fed M.I.T.'s megacomputer with an array of data ranging from expert opinion to hard, empirical facts --the world's known resources, population growth rates, the incidence of pollution connected with nuclear power plants, etc.

The question Meadows had to answer was: How long can population and industrialization continue to grow on this finite planet? Unlike the doomsday ecologists who predict that man will drown in pollution or starve because of overpopulation, Meadows' system concludes that the depletion of nonrenewable resources will probably cause the end of the civilization enjoyed by today's contented consumer.

End in Collapse. The sequence goes this way: As industrialization grows, it voraciously consumes enormous amounts of resources. Resources become scarcer, forcing more and more capital to be spent on procuring raw materials, which leaves less and less money for investment in new plants and facilities. At this stage, which might be about 2020, the computer's curves begin to converge and cross (see chart). Population outstrips food and industrial supplies. Investment in new equipment falls behind the rate of obsolescence, and the industrial base begins to collapse, carrying along with it the service and agricultural activities that have become dependent on industrial products (like medical equipment and fertilizers). Because of the lack of health services and food, the world's population dwindles rapidly.

In an attempt to find a way out of this basic dilemma, Meadows postulated other scenarios. He assumed that there are still huge, undiscovered reserves of natural resources, say, under the oceans. Testing that possibility, Meadows' computer shows that industrialization will accelerate--and the resulting runaway pollution will overwhelm the biosphere. Might not new technological devices control pollution? Sure, says the computer, but then population would soar and outstrip the ability of land to produce food. Every advance in technology consumes scarce natural resources, throws off more pollutants and often has unwanted social side effects, like creating huge and unmanageable unemployment. What if pollution was abated, the birthrate halved and food production doubled? The readouts are no less glum. There would still be some pollution from every farm and factory, and cumulatively it would still trigger catastrophe. After running thousands of such hypotheses through the computer, Meadows sums up his conclusion tersely: "All growth projections end in collapse."

The Meadows team offers a possible cure for man's dilemma--an all-out effort to end exponential growth, starting by 1975. Population should be stabilized by equalizing the birth and death rates. To halt industrial growth, investment in new, nonpolluting plants must not exceed the retirement of old facilities. A series of fundamental shifts in behavioral patterns must take place. Instead of yearning for material goods, people must learn to prefer services, like education or recreation. All possible resources must be recycled, including the composting of organic garbage. Products like automobiles and TV sets must be designed to last long and to be repaired easily.

As the report presents it, the result is a sort of Utopia--not the stagnation of civilization. "A society released from struggling with the many problems imposed by growth," the report says, "may have more energy and ingenuity available for solving other problems." Research, the arts, athletics might well flourish in a no-growth world. Nor would developing nations necessarily be frozen into everlasting poverty. Without the burden of an increasing population, they might provide fewer citizens more amenities.

"The report makes one thing abundantly clear: there is a limit to everything," says Japan's Yoicha Kaya, a club member and systems analyst now working for the Battelle Institute in Geneva. "There is no use in wringing hands. We can and must try to do what is humanly possible, and we must act soon." Even the club members were startled by the computer's findings but were unable to raise any important objections to them. The study is now being polished and refined by Potomac Associates, a public policy "think tank" in Washington that will publish The Limits to Growth in March. After translating it into a dozen languages, the Club of Rome will use its influence to place Limits in the right hands, where its message may influence policy and stir public debate.

One glaring weakness nonetheless remains in the report. It lacks a description of how a society dedicated to upward and onward growth can change its ways. Dennis Meadows, thoroughly aware of the problem, is trying to raise funds for a computer study of the possibilities. To date, he has had little success. Why? Mainly because Americans still tend to believe that continual growth is the solution to all problems.

The Club of Rome is not alone in its concern. Last week Britain's Ecologist magazine devoted 22 pages to a "Blueprint for Survival" that also projects disaster and argues for quick action to end exponential growth. The article gains its authority not from computer studies but from the endorsement of 33 of the U.K.'s most distinguished scientists, including Biologist Sir Julian Huxley, Geneticist C.H. Waddington and Naturalist Peter Scott. Unrestricted industrial and population expansion, they warn, must lead to "the breakdown of society and of the life support systems on this planet--possibly by the end of this century and certainly within the lifetime of our children."

Why has this dangerous trend not received wider attention? "Governments," reported the article, "are either refusing to face the relevant facts or are briefing their scientists in such a way that the seriousness is played down." As a result, "we may muddle our way to extinction."

Rather than wait, the scientists suggest urgent efforts to encourage a steady or declining population and heavy new taxes on raw materials. The taxes would penalize industries that consume great amounts of non-renewable natural resources and favor those that are labor intensive, thus keeping employment levels high. Another new tax would be based on the life of industrial products. A consumer buying a machine-made product that lasts one year would pay a 100% tax on it, while a product built to last 100 years would be taxfree. Stiff as such measures may seem now, the Ecologist says, they will avoid imposing infinitely greater hardships on future generations of British citizens.

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