Articles 2010

Learning about the Limits to Growth

L’histoire est peu connue, mais les chercheurs soviétiques connaissaient bien l’étude Limits to Growth de 1972. Après s’être eux-mêmes livrés à des exercices de modélisation globale, ils ont commencé à exprimer des craintes pour l’avenir de l’URSS et à suggérer de nouvelles politiques, avant même que Mikhaïl Gorbatchev ne lance son programme de glasnost (transparence) en 1987. Il faut aussi y voir l’origine de la théorie de l’hiver nucléaire, qui a mené à de sérieux efforts de réduction des stocks d’armements dans les années 1980.

Limits to growth, littéralement Les limites à la croissance est le titre d’un rapport publié en 1972 par chercheurs du MIT et du Club de Rome. Il prédisait un effondrement économique au cours du vingt-et-unième siècle. Quarante ans plus tard, l’économiste Graham Turner reprend les prévisions et relève leur concordance avec les dernières données. Les limites sont-elles atteintes? Les économistes travaillent le sujet.

Consumerism is the major cause of global warming and wrecking the planet for future generations. It is driven by a growth economy that favors the ever-expanding consumption of the already very affluent and has allowed the gap between the richest and poorest to grow to inflammatory proportions, both within the nation-state and globally. Today 16 percent of the global population consumes 80 percent of its resources. Americans alone are responsible for around 25 percent of global carbon emissions, and their ecological footprint is five times the global capacity of 1.8 hectares per capita.

In the early 1970s, ecologist Barry Commoner wrote The Closing Circle, in which he discussed the rapid growth of industry and technology and their persistent effect on all forms of life. He suggested that we can reduce the negative effects by sensitizing, informing and educating ourselves about our connection to the natural world. Commoner summarized the basics of ecology into what he termed “laws of ecology.” Others have also used this idea to develop simple statements that help us understand and remember our connections to nature. Here are five laws of ecology:

abs_empty

abs_empty

Une comparaison actualisée des “Limites de la Croissance” avec les données historiques

Don't you stumble, sometimes, into something that seems to make a lot of sense, but you can't say exactly why? For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff," from Lucius Annaeus Seneca who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."