drjohnbrown's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
5.0
For a book so many decades old, this feels like prophesy. The authors from the Club of Rome could have not possibly imagined the ways I constrained growth have impacted the planet- and frankly, their doomsday scenario now seems laughably conservative. This has pushed me hard, and I’ll be sitting with these concepts for awhile.
elerireads's review against another edition
4.0
The title is kind of clever because to start with they're talking about the absolute physical limits to growth and what happens when we reach them (complete societal collapse), but then later they get onto ways to impose our own limits (you know, to avoid said collapse). Main interesting takeaway from the model was that if you do something about one of the problem factors then all that happens is that one of the others gets you instead - you've got to deal with all of them at once... then looking ways to do that, it was the comment about needing to "suspend political feasibility" that stuck with me because yeah sure there are theoretically solutions but I can't realistically see any of them being attempted because it would be political suicide.
Doom-laden projections aside, this was a really fun global modelling exercise and I'm going to take what joy I can from what was otherwise a super depressing read.
Doom-laden projections aside, this was a really fun global modelling exercise and I'm going to take what joy I can from what was otherwise a super depressing read.
kxowledge's review
3.0
They predicted that the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years, invoking five major trends of global concert: accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.
However, the expectation is that as other, poorer nations increase their level of material wellbeing, they too will reduce birth rates and thus rates of population growth. The “race” between population and resources leads to two related problems: the rate at which resources are being used (and used up) and the inequality in the distribution of resources. There is no doubt that the world Is utilizing resources at historically unprecedented rates. That in itself is a measure of its “success” in mastering the environment and solving the economic problem but it has also given rise to fears of total exhaustion of resources. Such fears are not unreasonable, but they are not well-grounded historically. After all, it was the shortage of timber for charcoal that led to the use of coke for smelting iron ore. There are many other instances in which temporary or localized shortages of particular resources have given rise to substitutes, which often turn out to be more efficient or economical than those that they replaced.
However, the expectation is that as other, poorer nations increase their level of material wellbeing, they too will reduce birth rates and thus rates of population growth. The “race” between population and resources leads to two related problems: the rate at which resources are being used (and used up) and the inequality in the distribution of resources. There is no doubt that the world Is utilizing resources at historically unprecedented rates. That in itself is a measure of its “success” in mastering the environment and solving the economic problem but it has also given rise to fears of total exhaustion of resources. Such fears are not unreasonable, but they are not well-grounded historically. After all, it was the shortage of timber for charcoal that led to the use of coke for smelting iron ore. There are many other instances in which temporary or localized shortages of particular resources have given rise to substitutes, which often turn out to be more efficient or economical than those that they replaced.
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