What is responsible growth in an era of depleting resources?
Christine Dann investigates. Thirty-seven years ago, a book came out which predicted that around thirty-seven years from today – sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century – world population would peak, global birth and death rates would stabilise, and then birth rates would start to decline. At roughly the same time the supply of food per capita, and services per capita (healthcare, education, utilities like electricity and telecommunications) would also peak and start to decline. The same would happen with industrial output, non-renewable resources and pollution. The book was called Limits to Growth and it was written by four Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who had been commissioned by the Club of Rome (a group of industrialists) to provide these estimates. They did so using a sophisticated computer model which could handle a number of variables, and calculate their impacts on each other. Taking actual data from 1900 as their baseline, and using the actual d
