In 1972 a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Dennis and Donella Meadows and commissioned by the Club of Rome (1),  studied the interaction of population growth and economic growth with the finite resources of the planet, employing what was then a new tool: computer modelling.  Employing the most powerful computers of the time,  Meadows et. al. managed large quantities of variables such as human population, industrial growth, food production and environmental pollution, along with certain constants, such as non-renewable resources and the limits of the planet's ecosystems (2).  The study's results were disturbing:  if the rates of economic growth and natural resource use were to continue, there would be a catastrophic environmental and economic collapse sometime in the twenty-first century.

The study and its conclusions were published in the book The Limits to Growth,  often referred to as the Club of Rome Report.  The Limits to Growth sold 12 million copies and has been translated into 37 languages.  It is the best selling environmentally themed book in history (3).  Over the years it has been the object of passionate discussion, both in terms of praise and critique.  After 20 years the authors revisited their study and updated it in a book titled Beyond the Limits. Then in 2004 another further updated edition was published commemorating the 30th anniversary of the original publication.

The Limits to Growth could not have come out at a better time,  since the early 1970s were crucial in the development of the modern ecology movement. Forebears in the field of ecological economics such as Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen were then publishing some of their most significant works.  In 1971 biologist Barry Commoner published the valuable environmental book The Closing Circle, while ecologist Howard T. Odum, pioneer in systems ecology and the general systems theory,  published the equally important text Energy, Power and Society. Murray Bookchin was then publishing his critical theoretical and polemical essays combining social criticism, ecology, anti-capitalist militancy and anarchism,  establishing the foundations of social ecology.  His ideas led to the foundation of the Institute for Social Ecology in the United States in 1974.

In June of 1972, just after the publication of The Limits to Growth, the United Nations held its Conference on Human Environment, often referred to as the Stockholm Conference.  It was the first UN event dedicated to environmental issues, and it led to the founding of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In the same month, a public debate was organized in Paris on economic growth vs. de-growth, presided over by European Commision president, Sicco Mansholt, and eco-philosopher André Gorz, who is said to be the first person to use the term "decroissance."  Mansholt had come out against economic growth after reading The Limits to Growth.  The event, organized by the Nouvel Observateur newspaper, and attended by some three thousand people, also had the participation of German sociologist and theorist Herbert Marcuse, French philosopher Edgar Morin and the English ecologist Edward Goldsmith, publisher of The Ecologist magazine.

According to Catalan ecologist Joan Martinez-Alier, "there was still no talk of climate change but the subject of limited resources was discussed, along with population growth, the absurdity of macroeconomic accounting of the GDP,  happiness, capitalism, socialism, militarism, technology and complexity" (4).

The event had been inspired mainly by a letter sent by Mansholt after reading the report of the Club of Rome, to Franco Malfatti, then president of the European Commision, a post soon to be assumed by Mansholt.  The letter had a radical ecological content that would still be considered controversial nowadays. Martinez-Alier said:

"Mansholt took (in the letter) a position clearly in favour of a planned democratic socialism at the European level.  There were proposals directly directed against capitalist profits, in favour of suppressing the accelerated depreciation of capital goods that is deducted from taxes (and which inflates profits), and protests against the obsolescence of durable consumer goods. He advocated the introduction of certification of recyclable products that would involve tax relief.  European duties on imports would protect these certified recyclable products, since without these international competition would impede this less damaging production. He was also in favour of prohibiting the production of many non-essential products."

To the themes treated in Mansholt's letter, Morin and Gorz added various elements in the forum on that day in 1972,  including the class character of the ecology movement, a critique of Cartesian modernity and the growing importance of complexities and uncertainties.  The participants also added to Mansholt's list critiques of militarism, specifically denouncing the Vietnam War and French nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean.

Economist Goergescu-Roegen, one of the most important forerunners of ecological economics,  wrote to the Meadows congratulating them for their work,  but advising them that the great majority of economists, married intellectually and professionally to the notion of eternal growth, would attack them.  In effect, his warning was prescient.  In the New York Times book review, three economists called the Limits to Growth "empty" and "misleading",  "less than pseudoscience and little more than polemical fiction."  And in an editorial, Newsweek magazine characterized the work as "irresponsible nonsense." (5).

While the rejection by economists was nearly unanimous, the report was welcomed and celebrated by the ecology movement.  "Thirty years ago, it was easy for the critics to dismiss the limits to growth", said influential ecologist Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, upon reading the 30th anniversary edition. "But in today's world, with its collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, falling water tables, dying coral reefs, expanding deserts, eroding soils, rising temperatures, and disappearing species, it is not so easy to do so. We are all indebted to the "Limits" team for reminding us again that time is running out" (6).  The report was also praised by other world-renowned ecologists, such as activist and author Bill McKibben, renewable energy guru Amory Lovins, and Herman Daly, formerly high-ranking economist at the World Bank and now advocate of zero-growth steady state economics, and many others.  In spite of its technocratic and apolitical bent, the work has also received recognition and respect from progressive ecologists.

The defences and attacks on the Club of Rome Report have gone on for years and decades, and even today the book continues to attract attention.

De-growth is therefore hardly a new proposal.  Today it is more timely than ever as the forecasts of global warming's impacts appear more and more dire, as energy companies embark on demented projects through outlandish techniques such as the infamous hydraulic fracturing, and as the progressive Latin American camp offers as an alternative to the neoliberal status quo a developmentalist progressivism based on a suicidal extractivism (7).

There are those who whine that there are no viable alternatives to economic growth and extractivist policies.  They do not see that all over the world there are alternative movements and new social configurations that untiringly point the way to alternative futures (yes, in the plural), new thinking and new forms of action. One only needs eyes to see.

Notes

1)  The Club of Rome is an exclusive private organization founded in Italy's Accademia dei Lincei in 1968, and is composed of business leaders, scientists, economists, United Nations officials and high level political figures, including some past and present heads of state. According to its web page, it is dedicated to the study of the most serious problems facing humanity and to the formulation of alternative scenarios to solve them. Notable members have included Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel.

2)  The Meadows team developed the simulation software programme World3, an advanced version of World2, a programme created by Jay W. Forrester, a computer engineer specialized in systems theory.  Forrester founded the discipline of systems dynamics, which analyzes the behaviour of complex systems through mathematical models.  He applied systems dynamics to economic industrial cycles in his book Industrial Dynamics, and later applied his model to social problems and urban planning in his book Urban Dynamics.

At the end of the 1960s, Forrester conveyed to the leaders of the recently founded Club of Rome his interest in applying systems dynamics to the analysis of the problems of ecological sustainability at a global level. When the Club of Rome reacted favourably to his proposal, Forrester wrote the World2 world simulation software, and in 1971 published the book World Dynamics, in which he expressed his concern about unlimited economic growth in a limited system, such as our planet.

3) Christian Parenti  "The Limits to Growth": A Book that Launched a Movement.  This mega-bestseller has been attacked repeatedly since its  publication forty years ago, but its warnings about the climate were alarmingly prescient"  The Nation, December 24, 2012.

http://www.thenation.com/article/171610/limits-growth-book-launched-movement#

4) Joan Martínez-Alier “Macroeconomía ecológica, metabolismo social y justicia ambiental” Revista de Historia Actual, Vol. 9, Núm. 9 (2011)

5) Parenti.

6) Lester Brown. http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/limits_to_growth:paperback/praise/

7) Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero “El Nuevo progresismo Latinoamericano y el extractivismo del siglo XXI” CIP Americas Policy Program, January 31 2011 http://www.cipamericas.org/es/archives/3913; Ruiz-Marrero “Gobiernos progresistas siguen apostando al extractivismo” Monitor de Energía y Ambiente de América Latina, October 17 2010 http://energyandenvironmentmonitor.blogspot.com/2010/10/gobiernos-progresistas-siguen-apostando.html; http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/search/label/Extractivismo

- Ruiz Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, investigative journalist and environmental educator. He is a Research Associate of the Institute for Social Ecology  (http://www.social-ecology.org/) y editor of the bilingual Latin America Energy and Environment Monitor (http://energyandenvironmentmonitor.blogspot.com/).