It’s the 50th anniversary to “Limits to Growth”. The message and method - think systemically, especially about planet and climate - are still relevant. And dramatisable
Always interested in artistic and creative representations of our key crises on this site. Here’s something fascinating - a BBC Radio Four drama presentation “inspired by the work of Donella Meadows, lead author of the seminal 1972 report on Earth's capacity to support human economic expansion. The report's authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens”. The script is by Sarah Woods, and the play stars Samantha Dakin and Ben Cura.
Some more context is below:
50 Years After The Limits to Growth
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth, and this piece from Ugo Bardi, co-editor of a new book Limits and Beyond, explains its continuing relevance:
What was so special about that book? Many things: perhaps the most important one was that it was the first study that addressed the problems of the future of humanity in a “systemic” way, that is, using a model that, for the time, was incredibly sophisticated.
Let me explain. Today there is a lot of talk about “artificial intelligence,” but the concept was born in the 1960s. “The Limits to Growth” was part of the concept of using computers as a tool to help human intelligence.
One of the problems we face when we try to manage complex systems, that is systems where many factors interact with each other, is that the human mind heavily relies on “intuition.” We tend to focus on single parameters and consider them as the only relevant factor.
Did you notice how people tend to interpret the world’s problems on the basis of single factors? “Overpopulation!” “Climate change!” “Pollution!” “Peak Oil” “The public debt!” and so on. All these are relevant factors, certainly, but none of them is the only problem.
But how can we estimate their effect when every single factor interacts with all the others? If you focus on the wrong parameter, you can make enormous mistakes.
That’s where a computer can be helpful. The computer is not intelligent, but for this very reason, it is not swayed by ideology or other kinds of personal biases.
So, in 1972, the authors of the “Limits to Growth” created a computer-based model that analyzed the human economy according to various hypotheses on the availability of resources, pollution, population growth, and other things.
It was not a prophecy, not a political program, and not a religious revelation, either. The “Limits to Growth” model was simply an evaluation designed to answer the question, “what will happen if…?”
The results were stark and clear. If the economy remained focused on growth at all costs, the global economic system would reach its physical limits around 2010-2020. And it wasn’t just a matter of stopping growth. It was much worse: the model predicted the collapse of the system.
Today, given the current situation, we may legitimately wonder if we are finding ourselves at the beginning of the collapse that some of the scenarios of “The Limits to Growth” had seen in store for humankind. Is that our future?
Maybe, but let me repeat that “The Limits to Growth” was not a prophecy: there was nothing unavoidable in the scenarios it proposed. And the authors never saw themselves as prophets of doom. The study was conceived as a roadmap to avoid collapse!
Unfortunately, we didn’t put into practice the solutions that the study proposed, such as reducing the consumption of natural resources, slowing down economic growth, and the like. But it is also true that today many things have changed.
The revolution in renewable technologies has changed the rules of the game. With renewable energy, in principle, we can phase out fossil fuels and avoid the main causes of the coming collapse: depletion and climate change.
Yes, but this does not mean that renewable energy comes for free: we have to invest in it and not a little. Unfortunately, up to now, we have not invested enough, not to mention the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder the new installations.
Even if we could move toward renewables fast enough that we could smoothly replace fossil fuels, that would not be sufficient to avoid all problems. Never forget that the origin of collapse is its opposite: growth.
Already long ago, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, noted that ruin is rapid after growth: it is called the “Seneca Effect.” If we want to avoid the “Seneca Cliff,” the rapid decline that arrives after the growth phase is over, we need to recognize the limits of our planet. Growth at all costs is a dream of the 20th century, that we must abandon now.
“Stories are little systems”
We also found a 2018 interview between Sarah Woods, the. dramatist of R4’s Limits to Growth play, and Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins, for his Imagination blog. Sarah show just how deeply her creative vision is shaped by Meadows’ systems thinking:
I would want for everybody to start looking at society and their lives as systems, which is about three things isn’t it? Elements and interconnections and then the things that come out of that. I suppose at the moment I feel that we’ve got a problem with the way that we’re relating to each other. There’s a lot of division so that we’re in little boxes.
We’re not able to see outside of those little boxes very often, and actually those interconnections between us are the ways in which we start to engage our imaginations beyond ourselves, and start to see things more systemically rather than as single issues. Single issues aren’t really going to solve the problem.
I would use systems theory, which is essentially about using our imaginations because it’s relational, to start to resolve a lot of the problems that we’ve got. In doing that obviously I would use story to do that. I would use story and I guess in a lot of the work I do I look at systems theory and story and how they’re sort of the same thing. Stories are little systems.
…I do bang on about systems a lot. The way I teach playwriting and story is encouraging people to think about a system. A good story has in it characters, structure, story plot. It has those basic elements and really, how you create a story is how you interconnect those things. They’re all connected to each other really, really strongly and the better connected they are, the more satisfying the story is.
You define your set of ingredients and then you work with it. You don’t bring in too many extra things from outside. Systems are a great way to understand how we live and a great way to tell stories, and there’s a lot to be learnt from that way of thinking. That’s how I teach them and that’s what makes a good story, is something that’s deeply and well connected.
…Essentially we have all these really big stories that we try to engage people with, but they’re distant from us perhaps in space and time. We’ve got more pressing things in our lives. It’s very hard to make that sort of stuff stick unless you can connect it to people’s lives and to where people are.
So, start from the individual, start from the personal, and look at what are our connections, as individuals and communities, to those bigger picture? Then as a group of people, how can we connect with it and actually take action? That works really well, because people do want to create change, but these things are so massive that they disable us continually, don’t they?
Even as creatives and campaigners working with all that stuff, it is disabling. I’ve found there’s times when I’ve moved away from working on climate change a bit, and then back into again, because it’s just felt too exhausting. We all experience that. So yeah, finding ways to engage individuals with that bigger story, or any of those big stories, is the only way to genuinely energise and create action. It’s the same thing.
It’s the idea of systemically linking one thing to another. I’ve done that over the course of an evening, or you can do that in longer projects with people, and it’s a good way of maintaining energy and ensuring people feel well connected to each other. All of these things, all of it, is about how do we as individuals create relationships between ourselves and between important ideas in the world that are sustainable? I guess for me that’s what it all comes back to, and our imaginations are a really, really key part of that.
More here. And a final link to the Radio 4 play.
Link to R4 drama