Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update - Hardcover

Meadows, Donella H.; Randers, Jorgen; Meadows, Dennis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931498512 ISBN 13: 9781931498517

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co, 2004

Synopsis

In 1972 four young scientists at MIT wrote a book called The Limits to Growth that shocked the world and became an international best-seller. Using the World3 computer model, the authors looked into the future and sounded an alarm, for the first time showing the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet. Their book gained worldwide attention and became the cornerstone of a global debate on how to achieve a sustainable future.

Twenty years later the authors wrote Beyond the Limits, a follow-up volume that showed humanity was already overshooting Earth's limits.Beyond the Limits again provoked a national debate and galvanized the scientific and environmental academics leaders to incorporateLimits to Growth into the core environmental studies curriculum.

Now Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update brings data on overshoot and global ecological collapse to the present moment. It provides a short course in the World3 computer model, types of growth, and the various kinds of overshoot likely to occur in the current century. While it remains to be seen whether public policy will respond effectively and in time to problems such as climate change, this book makes a compelling case for the vital need for a Sustainability Revolution.

The CD

This disc is intended for serious students of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. It permits users to reproduce and examine the details of the ten scenarios published in the book. The CD can be run on most Macintosh and PC operating systems. With it you will be able to:

• Reproduce the three graphs for each of the scenarios as they appear in the book
• Graph the eleven individual parameters for each scenario
• Create comparative plots to examine the behavior of one parameter under the assumptions for two or more scenarios
• Print out 47 key variables in five-year increments from 1900 to 2100 for any of the scenarios

 The CD also includes:

• Full model equations compatible with STELLA
• Eighty-five JPEG files of the important book illustrations for use in lectures and classroom discussions

About this title

Review

If you only read one book ... make this it! -- L HUNTER LOVINS, co-author of Natural Capitalism

It is time for the world to re-read Limits to Growth! The message
of 1972 is more real and relevant now, and we wasted 30 valuable years of
action by misreading the message of the first book' -- MATTHEW R SIMMONS, founder, Simmons & Company International, the world's largest energy investment banking firm

Not everything bears repetition, but truth does - especially when
that truth is both denied by entrenched interests and verified by new
information. -- HERMAN E DALY, former World Bank senior economist and professor, University of Maryland

This is compelling, essential and indeed necessary reading for all
concerned with our common future. -- International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education Vol 6 no 3 2005

This is superb stuff. If you read only one book this year my guess
is that it should be this one!
-- Social and Environmental Accounting Journal, April 2005

About the Author

Donella Meadows was Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, USA. Jorgen Randers is a policy analyst and President Emeritus at the Norwegian School of Management. Dennis Meadows is Professor of Systems Management and Director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research, University of New Hampshire, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931498512
• ISBN 13: 9781931498517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 338