The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update QUOTES

1 " We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

2 " Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

3 " People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

4 " The difference between a sustainable society and a present-day economic recession is like the difference between stopping and automobile purposefully with the brakes versus stopping it by crashing into a brick wall. When the present economy overshoots, it turns around too quickly and unexpectedly for people and enterprises to retrain, relocate, and readjust. A deliberate transition to sustainability would take place slowly enough, and with enough forewarning, to that people and businesses could find their places in the new economy. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

5 " But rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

6 " One of the strangest assumptions of present-day mental models is the idea that world of moderation must be a world of strict, centralized government control. For a sustainable economy, that kind of control is not possible, desirable, or necessary. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

7 " When we, system dynamicists, see a pattern persist in many parts of a system over long periods, we assume that it has causes embedded in the feedback loop structure of the system. Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. Growth as usual has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Continuing growth as usual will never close that gap. Only changing the structure of the system—the chains of causes and effects—will do that. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

8 " The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable. The culture tends to deny the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology, the workings of a free market, and the growth of the economy as the solution to all problems, even the problems created by growth. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

9 " The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little “real world” evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

10 " Individuals support growth-oriented policies, because they believe growth will give them an ever increasing welfare. Governments seek growth as a remedy for just about every problem. In the rich world, growth is believed to be necessary for employment, upward mobility, and technical advance. In the poor world, growth seems to be the only way out of poverty. Many believe that growth is required to provide the resources necessary for protecting and improving the environment. Government and corporate leaders do all they can to produce more and more growth. For these reasons growth has come to be viewed as a cause for celebration. Just consider some synonyms for that word: development, progress, advance, gain, improvement, prosperity, success. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

11 " The global distribution of wealth and opportunities is extremely skewed. The richest 20 percent of the world’s population controls more than 80 percent of the world gross product and uses nearly 60 percent of world commercial energy. (Source: World Bank.) "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

12 " There are “50 simple things you can do to save the planet.” Buy an energy-efficient car, for one. Recycle your bottles and cans, vote knowledgeably in elections—if you are among those people in the world blessed with cars, bottles, cans, or elections. There are also not-so-simple things to do: Work out your own frugally elegant lifestyle, have at most two children, argue for higher prices on fossil energy (to encourage energy efficiency and stimulate development of renewable energy), work with love and partnership to help one family lift itself out of poverty, find your own “right livelihood,” care well for one piece of land, do whatever you can to oppose systems that oppress people or abuse the earth, run for election yourself. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

13 " If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world. —ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON AND
U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1992 "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

14 " In May 1985 the historic paper was published that announced an “ozone hole” in the Southern Hemisphere.11 The news shocked the scientific world. If true, the results proved that humankind had already exceeded a global limit. CFC use had grown above sustainable limits. Humans were already in the process of destroying their ozone shield. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States (NASA) scrambled to check readings on atmospheric ozone made by the Nimbus 7 satellite, measurements that had been taken routinely since 1978. Nimbus 7 had never indicated an ozone hole. Checking back, NASA scientists found that their computers had been programmed to reject very low ozone readings on the assumption that such low readings must indicate instrument error.12 Fortunately the measurements thrown out by the computer were recoverable. They confirmed the Halley Bay observations, showing that ozone levels had been dropping over the South Pole for a decade. Furthermore, they provided a detailed map of the hole in the ozone layer. It was enormous, about the size of the continental United States, and it had been getting larger and deeper every year. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

15 " If an eventual nine billion people all consumed materials at the rate of the average late-twentieth-century American, that would require an increase in worldwide steel production by a factor of five, copper by a factor of eight, and aluminum by a factor of nine. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

16 " After a session of working with a model, computer or mental, it’s a good idea to step back for a moment and remember that it is not the “real world” we have been experiencing, but a representation that is “realistic” in some respects, “unrealistic” in others. The task is to find insight in the model from those features of the scenarios that seem “realistic. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

17 " Therefore the “real” system may not respond as forcefully or successfully as does the World3 system. The model’s perfectly working market and smooth, successful technologies (with no surprising side effects) are also very optimistic. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

18 " Growth of what? For whom? At what cost? Paid by whom? What is the real need here, and what is the most direct and efficient way for those who have that need to satisfy it? How much is enough? What are the obligations to share? "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

19 " if the fertility of the entire world population reaches replacement level (about two children per family on average) by the year 2010, the population will continue growing until 2060 and will level off at about eight billion. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

20 " Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. "

― Donella H. Meadows , The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update