The Future of Growth is no Growth
If you work with long-term strategy you need to read this.
Last week, I got a letter from my Future self. Following its advice I'm focusing on Foresight 4 the Real World. What that means I'll be figuring out in the open here.
“A sustainable society is one that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
— World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987
I found it while researching the work from Donella Meadows. She was one of the pioneers of System Thinking. Together with her former husband Dennis Meadows and others, they were in charge of research that could have changed the world. That is why we are going to visit them 50 years ago. 🚗⏳💥
BACK TO THE PAST: CLUB OF ROME 1972
“The Limits to Growth. […] went on to sell 30 million copies in more than 30 languages, making it the best-selling environmental book in history.”
The Limits to Growth is published with the findings of a 2-year MIT study commissioned by the Club of Rome. The study combined the most advanced computing power of the era to analyze humanity's impact on our environment. They created the World3 computer model, pioneering in Systems Dynamics, to simulate future scenarios on the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems.
The book was said to be sent to the heads of state of all nations, all members of the EU parliament and the US Congress, all ambassadors of the UN, and other individuals around the world, by its publisher POTOMAC ASSOCIATES.
Within the book, there was an important warning, regarding the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources.
After reviewing their computer simulations, the research team came to the following conclusions:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.[b] The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
The book was received with deep appreciation by many, but not all. As it made clear if we continued on the path of endless growth, we risked triggering the collapse of our modern civilization within 50 to 100 years. But that was not all.
It also had an alternative - a scenario where the collapse could be avoided.
On such, pressing piece of evidence one can despair, dismiss or act on it. Unfortunately, most leaders chose dismissal. But we can choose better.
It sparked the start of the environmental movement, but it also sparked hate, by economists, journalists, politicians, and most surprisingly, even scientists. ↓
It is mind boggling that still today, most people haven't heard about it!
[Which can be better understood through the podcast time trip above ↑]
This warning was meant to aid us [world leaders in particular] in changing course to avoid most of the global crises we face today. Crises that were denied, laughed off, and taken as ideological doomism, or worse.
Now they spread out, wide and accelerate.
Let's analyze the two important lessons this time-trip tells us:
The idea of infinite growth on a finite planet is nonsense. They got to look into possible futures, pioneering with the use of a computer model to generate multiple scenarios of interaction between the possible growth trends of indicators, half a century ago.
The dismissal aftertale that followed for the last 50 years, by mainstream media and Governments. Where many leaders and educated people not only dismissed but attacked the group's work. Without evidence and based mostly on assumptions and beliefs, much like modern extremists.
It is always easier to attack the messanger than to adress the message.
Why was it so hard to imagine a way of living coherently with Earth's limits?
The answer to this and the reactionary attacks on the book lies in the paradigm of endless growth as a given. A colonial worldview of exploration tied with exploitation expanded through industrialization. An idea sought after and fuelled to this day, like 'The Singularity'.
That notion became ingrained in our minds because it has been pushed for decades, by those who get the most out of it. The ones that use it as a means to concentrate power and wealth. [Which is more concentrated than ever.]
But if we stop to take a step back, and look at it from a macro perspective. Beyond our established assumptions and notions of progress. We can realize, rather quickly that this is a modern [100 to 50 years old] western-industrial notion.
For most of mankind's existence, we have lived within our ecosystems’ boundaries. Most of the global population today, still does not overshoot the Earth's resources. A few do, but it keeps spreading.
SYSTEMIC ISSUES → SYSTEMIC SOLUTIONS
To tackle these issues the findings of destructive mindless growth and the denial at its root. I find great inspiration in the later ‘systems thinking’ work from Dana Meadows herself.
Who better than the one working on this challenge for half a century?
GROWTH IS NOT A GOOD METRIC
By definition, growth is an increase, the positive variation of an indicator in time.
Robert Kennedy at the University of Kansas. March 18, 1968
“Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Growth on its own isn't bad. Endless growth as a belief is
Look at nature. A tree grows from a small seed to a giant living being. At a certain point it stops. It is mature and still able to sustain herself, her own weight. In spring she reproduces, through her beautiful flowers, and with a little help of pollinators like bees. Those flowers, after pollinated, grow to become fruits, that will feed other animals and end up fertilizing the ground somewhere else. Where probably their offspring will grow, repeating the cycle.
This short paragraph illustrates more or less, how [most] growth works in nature. It happens up to an equilibrium. Not a linear flow nor a closed loop, but a cycle that opens up to many other cycles, creating interdependencies in a system. That becomes resilient by the connections between its parts.
We need to understand growth as part of a bigger whole, like a fractal, made of cycles that spiral from one another to form interdependencies.
Unfortunately, we still see big money and intellectual effort being poured into accelerating this flow. Look at this recent report from WEF, titled The Future of Growth. Completely ignoring every piece of information above, all the 50 years since the first warning, it still pushes Growth into our Future.
The report acknowledges GDP's limitations and goes on to use three different flavors of it. Including its growth per capita and on average in 5 years. Growth and GDP are kept as fixed assumptions immutable and viable.
Even though they go on to add other indicators that should improve the analysis, it seems to just overcomplicate it. Like a whipped cream frosting with a cherry on top of a rotten banana split. 🍦
It is just one example. An important one, nonetheless. Because it is 2024.
This is happening ↓
It seems I really knew what to tell myself. As I reviewed this issue, I went back on some of my writing from last year and found the following quote:
“If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.”
— Victor Papanek
I believe the same goes for Futures and Foresight.
We must look beyond the status quo to be able to imagine higher models. Better Futures and take action.
There we go connecting the dots, collecting the breadcrumbs for a better future.
Last but not least ↓
Next week I will be in Rome for ‘The Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training’ it will be an amazing opportunity to polish even further my lens of the present to envision a different future for 2099. A sustainable, regenerative, ancestral Future.
See you in the Future!
I'm Victor Mascarenhas, the time traveler in charge of the Red Delorean. I have 15+ years of experience leading strategic projects in more than 10 countries. When not writing here, I help organizations and individuals through Strategic Foresight and Sustainable Innovation.