Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns.

Reading Limits to Growth, the hardest and most crucial aspect to wrap your mind around is the crux of the book itself, the basis for the title, ‘limits to growth.’ This is: Exponential growth cannot go on forever. Progress is, in fact, finite.

It’s a really hard concept for people to grasp, as we are taught from birth that progress is a given, that humanity will continue to climb steadily higher toward our inevitable Star Trek future. And for sure, those of us lucky enough to have been born in first-world countries have been very fortunate to ride the crest of exponential growth for the past couple of hundred years due to fossil fuel discovery and innovation. However, we cannot assume that will continue. In the 2020 preface to the updated edition, the authors argue

We know absolutely that physical growth on this planet will stop. We do not know precisely when, though our computer scenarios suggest it will happen in this century, probably within the next decades.

As they demonstrate, energy sources such as fossil fuels are finite; no new replacements for these resources are being created, at least not at the rate we use them. Those of you who followed the “peak oil” movement in the 2000s know what I’m talking about. But if this idea is new to you, maybe you can picture it: What happens when all of that black gold, that Texas tea, stops a-bubblin’ up? What will power our cars, our washers and dryers, our home heating systems?

The authors aren’t saying that we’re going to run out of oil tomorrow, or that the apocalypse is imminent. But the problem comes in when the amount of energy required to extract a resource is greater than what can be gained from that resource. This means definite decline, likely sometime over the next century, or perhaps as soon as in the next decade or two. Maybe we’re already seeing it.

From a permaculture perspective, this book is a very important read. The authors walk you through 11 scenarios, from worst- to best-case. In the first one, we’ve done nothing to strike a counterbalance and create a sustainable system for energy consumption and conservation. The result? We hit collapse sometime between 2000 and 2050. “Collapse” means a rather abrupt nosedive off a cliff as industrial output, life expectancy, and quality of life plummet, along with available food, services, and goods per person. Meanwhile, pollution skyrockets, exacerbating the decline.

In the next 10 scenarios, the authors make small tweaks for counterbalancing measures such as population controls, antipollution, agricultural sustainability and yield-increasing techniques, and other methods. Only in the last few scenarios, with early counterbalance interventions enacted, do we avoid collapse.

The worst-case scenario, unfortunately, is now playing out in real time. As Dennis Meadows states in the 2020 preface

I believe that society is nearing the decline portrayed in Scenario 1.

While the book’s darkest element is the tragically missed opportunity, the solutions offered by the authors remain strongly applicable, if not now in order to avoid collapse altogether, then to help us all prepare for it. And I believe that's what permaculture can uniquely offer us all.

I've given the book a more in-depth treatment over a three-part series:

Review and giveaway (paid subscribers are eligible to win a free paperback copy, drawing the first week of November 2022)

Welcome to the slowpocalypse (my word for what certainly isn't a sudden, catastrophic apocalypse)

On the fact that renewables are not a 1:1 replacement for fossil fuels