This article was published in abridged form in Transitions & Énergies, no. 21, summer 2024.
The Meadows Report is often presented as a scientific document that predicted that economic growth would lead to the collapse of society within the coming decades. Yet there are strong reasons to question its relevance.
What is commonly known as the Meadows Report is a study commissioned in 1970 by a think tank called the Club of Rome, which brought together scientists, economists, senior civil servants and industrialists concerned about the major developments shaping the world. Produced by a team of four MIT researchers under the direction of Dennis Meadows, and written by Donella Meadows – hence the Report’s common name – it was published in 1972 under the title The Limits to Growth (translated into French as Halte à la croissance ?). It is based on computer modelling and arrives at twelve scenarios for humanity’s development up to 2100. With a single exception, all of them predict a collapse of society, characterised by a sudden fall in population under the pressure of food shortages, the depletion of raw materials and runaway pollution. The most optimistic scenario is the one in which population size and industrial production are stabilised as early as the 1970s. As the Report puts it: ‘If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity [1].’ With this conclusion, the Report became a reference point among degrowth advocates and environmentalists, who see it as one of the first scientific documents to warn of the risk of societal collapse if growth continues. But is it reliable?
The methodological error
To draw up these scenarios for humanity’s future, the Meadows Report varies five parameters: non-renewable natural resources (oil, minerals, etc.), agricultural production, industrial production, population size and the level of pollution. These parameters are, of course, interlinked. For example, the Report assumes that population grows with food production and declines with pollution. Similarly, it considers that industrial and agricultural production are limited by the availability of resources, which only dwindle, more or less quickly, over time. Or again, it estimates that pollution rises with industrial production and that soil quality deteriorates with agricultural production. And so on. These relationships between parameters are not absurd. At the same time, they rest on the assumption that our society struggles to manage, and still more to resolve, the problems of shortages and pollutant emissions. It is as if technological development scarcely made it possible to find new resources and to curb industrial discharges or the degradation of natural environments. Under this assumption, population growth therefore necessarily leads, over time, to a shortage of raw materials and to an increase in pollution or soil degradation, which inexorably bring that very population growth to an end, or even cause its collapse. In short, the result lies in the assumption.
This methodological bias is admittedly not so obvious to spot in the Report, because the latter acknowledges a certain capacity of our society to find new resources, notably through the development of methods for locating and extracting minerals. It also envisages that new recycling techniques will be developed. Likewise, it accepts that pollution could be reduced, or even stabilised. It also imagines that it will be possible to increase agricultural yields. But, at the same time, it asserts that population, demand for resources and, if not pollution, at least soil degradation continue to rise. Innovations therefore change nothing in the overall dynamic described above. As the availability of resources can only decrease, and pollution or soil degradation only increase, with a growing population, the Report invariably reaches the conclusion that society will collapse before the end of the 21st century, under the impact of the depletion of raw materials, pollution or food shortages. In short, it is always a conclusion that follows from the starting assumption.
In this approach, the only way to avoid collapse and the misfortunes that come with it is to stop growth right now, that is, to stabilise population and industrial production. The Report nevertheless establishes that if this move to a steady state begins not in the 1970s but in the early 2000s, stabilisation can last only a few decades before a phase of decline sets in anyway. Consequently, this scenario too brings us back to the idea that future threats of resource depletion, pollution and malnutrition cannot be tackled directly through technological development and human ingenuity, but only by a rapid halt to economic and demographic growth. Humanity would thus be, at best, condemned to stagnation.
This methodological bias in the Report is not new. In 1898, in his Essai sur le principe de population, the Reverend Thomas Malthus had adopted a similar approach in his analysis of the economic situation of Great Britain. He asserted that population tended to multiply exponentially (known as geometric growth), whereas food resources increased at best at a constant rate (known as arithmetic growth). He deduced from this that famines (and the wars that might result from them) periodically brought the population back to its equilibrium level. Of course, history has amply shown that Malthus was mistaken. Over the past two centuries, humanity has succeeded in increasing its food resources and in growing considerably. Yet the Meadows Report merely took up Malthus’s approach using computing techniques more sophisticated than his calculations. It is therefore unsurprising that it, too, arrives at the idea that growth cannot be sustained.
The authors of the Report explicitly acknowledge this lineage. In a critique addressed to them just after its publication, a certain Christopher Freeman points out that, as a general rule, ‘the validity of computer calculations depends entirely on the quality of the data and the assumptions (or mental constructs) on which they are based [2]’. He then adds a vivid criticism using the following expression: ‘Malthus in, Malthus out [3]’. Yet far from seeing this characterisation as a flaw, the authors of the Report fully embrace it in their reply to the article. They write that they agree with Freeman’s expression, then go on to say: ‘We chose to study a Malthusian view of a limited world because […] our own impressions suggest that the world is finite in several important respects [4].’ The reply has the merit of candour, but it does not answer the criticism. The debate over Malthusianism is not about whether the Earth is finite; it is about whether or not humans are able to get around the limits they encounter.
To be perfectly clear, it is obvious that exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world. But that is not how the question of growth should be framed. The question is whether human society can continue to develop for decades, or even centuries or millennia, before either being permanently confronted with the Earth’s limits or finding ways to exploit the resources of space. It is therefore not a simple matter of logic in which the finiteness of the Earth would imply that growth must stop as soon as possible. It is an empirical question about humans’ capacity to exploit natural resources and to show ingenuity. Yet it is difficult to determine in advance the extent both of the new resources that might be discovered and of the technological innovations that might be made. On this point, let us not forget that Malthus was wrong. Over the past two centuries, food production has far outstripped population growth. The same is true of industrial production as a whole. We live in a society of abundance. Admittedly, Malthus’s error does not mean that growth can continue for decades or centuries more. It merely indicates that we should be careful not to predict too hastily that humanity’s development has reached its limits. Yet that is precisely what the Report does.
Hazardous predictions
One of the first surprises on reading the Report is to find that, after considering different types of pollution, it decides to reduce them all to a single one, pollution in general, as if it were a single entity with a single dynamic. Above all, in almost all of its scenarios, it assumes that this pollution does nothing but increase with industrial production, to the point of causing a fall in population, if that has not already occurred for other reasons. Yet this link between pollution and industrial production has not been demonstrated. Admittedly, in its early stages, industrialisation always leads to an increase in pollution but, as a general rule, the more societies develop, the more they find ways to lower their level of pollution [5]. Take the example of lead. Between 1978 and 2016, the concentration of lead in the blood of children in the United States fell by 95%. Why? Quite simply because the government legislated for its drastic reduction, notably in petrol [6]. The same phenomenon can be seen in all developed countries. It is also repeated for most pollutants. For example, again in the United States, between 1973 and 2019, sulphur dioxide emissions fell by 80% [7]. One could go on listing the pollutants that have declined since the Report was written. Assuming, as the Report does, that industrial development leads to a constant increase in pollution that ends up reducing the size of the human population is therefore, to say the least, debatable.
On resources, the Report’s analysis is also problematic. It argues that our society will collapse before the end of the 21st century because of a shortage of raw materials if our consumption continues at its current pace. It even gives estimates of when the known reserves of 19 raw materials will run out. Yet for ten of them, the deadline had already passed by 2024, and none has been exhausted. Published in 1972, the Report thus states that gold reserves could be exhausted in 1983, mercury in 1985, silver in 1988, tin in 1995, lead in 1998, oil in 2003, copper in 2008, natural gas in 2010 and tungsten in 2012. Next on the list is molybdenum, whose reserves are supposed to last 79 years, meaning they should be exhausted in 2051. The Report does admittedly suggest that these estimates will very probably have to be revised upwards and that they therefore do not indicate a date of exhaustion. But it still seriously asks whether resources will be ‘sufficient to allow the economic development of the 7 billion people expected by the year 2000 and to enable them to reach a reasonably high standard of living [8]’. This fear now appears all the more exaggerated given that the annual production of some of these minerals has increased over the past fifty years, sometimes almost tripling, and that even oil production, whose peak we are regularly told has already been reached, does not seem set to decline [9].
The error in these estimates lies in calculating the number of years remaining by dividing the quantity of known and estimated reserves by annual consumption. This is a mistake insofar as the scarcity of a material encourages industrialists to look for new reserves and, often, to find them. This search is moreover made easier by the fact that technological progress improves exploration and extraction methods while reducing their costs. It can also dampen demand for certain materials by substituting abundant ones for scarce ones (plastic in place of metal, synthetic fibres in place of natural fibres, and so on). Of course, one can imagine that, one day, raw material resources will run out, if we do not go and look for them at the bottom of the oceans or in space. It is therefore not out of place to question their limits. But it is unwise to suppose that one can estimate, even approximately, a date of exhaustion derived, on the one hand, from the rate of consumption and, on the other, from observed reserves or those assumed to exist.
The Report makes a similar error with regard to agricultural production. It does imagine that productivity in this area could increase. But it argues that, because of a limit on available land, production will still not be sufficient to feed a growing world population. We would even have little time left before hitting this limit. The Report thus writes: ‘even under the optimistic assumption of using all possible land, there will still be a serious land shortage before the year 2000 if per capita land requirements and population growth rates remain the same as today [10]’. To drive the message home, a few lines later it reasserts that ‘within 30 years […], there could be a sudden and serious shortage [11]’ of arable land. The authors of the Report even feel that the ‘symptoms [of this crisis] are already visible in many regions of the world [12]’. Fifty years on, we can see just how wrong these predictions were. Food production has never been so abundant and, if there are unfortunately still people who do not have enough to eat, it is solely because of social or political problems. Above all, the Report did not anticipate that agriculture would be able to feed a growing population while using less land [13].
On the evolution of the world population, the Report is also mistaken. According to its authors, it must grow constantly until it is halted by food shortages or excessive pollution. The Report admittedly allows that it might stabilise, but only under social constraint. Yet almost all demographers now acknowledge that we will probably reach peak humanity within a few decades. Above all, this decline is not expected to be caused by a deadly pandemic, famines, runaway pollution or climate change. It is simply because, as society develops, women have on average fewer children, quite simply because they want fewer. In a great many countries, the fertility rate has even fallen below the replacement rate, beneath which the population is bound to shrink. Yet this fall in fertility, which is in many respects a remarkable trend of our time, does not fit the Report’s approach at all and helps to make all of its analyses suspect.
Update to the Report
An update of the Report, by three of the original four authors, was published in 2004, roughly 30 years after the first version. This time, the Report analyses ten scenarios, broadly similar to the previous twelve, and introduces two new variables (humanity’s ecological footprint and its level of well-being). It implicitly takes into account some of the objections that had been raised against it. For example, it now acknowledges that ‘we have succeeded in eliminating most of the pollution that used to escape from the chimneys and discharge pipes of factories in industrialised countries [14]’. It nonetheless passes over in silence the many errors of judgement it had made and, above all, does not revisit its overall position. Its authors thus argue that the ‘decade that has just passed has largely corroborated [their] thesis that the world is already in overshoot [15]’ or that ‘most of what [they] wrote in The Limits to Growth thirty years ago remains true today [16]’. Above all, they do not hesitate to declare that they are ‘much more pessimistic than in 1972 about the future that awaits us [17]’. Then, confident in their predictions, they write that we must ‘wait 10 years to find out who [between them and their critics] best understood the future [18]’. We are now 20 years on from the writing of those lines, and it is far from established that a collapse of our society is looming on the horizon.
The authors of the Report thus show an ability to always find reasons for society to collapse, even when the previous ones have proved incorrect. For example, regarding sources of energy (gas, oil, coal) and ores, they argued in 1972 that it was very unlikely that new deposits would be found. In the new Report, they now acknowledge that reserves can increase, precisely through the discovery of new deposits. But, they hasten to add, collapse is still highly probable, because of the rising costs of exploiting them and of the discharges this entails into the atmosphere, river waters and various landfills, which they call sinks: ‘If a possible collapse worries us, it is not because we believe that humanity is about to exhaust the planet’s stocks of energy and materials. […] we are more concerned about the rising costs of exploiting our planet’s sources and sinks [19].’
More specifically, with regard to fossil fuels, they now acknowledge that, because of discoveries, the more years pass, the more exploitable resources increase ‘despite a significant rise in consumption [20]’. But they add that the ‘discoveries of the last 30 years should not be interpreted as a sign that there is no immediate limit to fossil fuel reserves [21]’. Then, while acknowledging that ‘nobody knows whether the source or the sink of the fossil fuel flow will be the more constraining limit [22]’, they argue, somewhat by guesswork, that, for them, ‘it is the sink that seems to pose a problem [23]’, in particular the atmospheric sink, because of the global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
The authors adopt a similar strategy for raw materials. They note ‘that estimates of resource stocks [h]ave reassured those who feared that the planet would have to face a “shortage” of minerals [24]’, but without recalling that, in 1972, they were among those who were worried about it. Then, unable to resist predicting that ‘lead, tin, silver and zinc’ could soon be exhausted [25], they suggest that resources may be larger than is imagined and acknowledge ‘that the price of materials has continued to fall over the past ten years, proof that supply exceeded demand [26]’. But, still committed to the idea that growth cannot last, they add that ‘the constraints that environmental and social factors could place on the availability of minerals are receiving growing attention [27]’. In other words, even if resources remain for a long time yet, the authors of the Report find a reason that will soon make their exploitation very difficult (namely, here, the lack of profitability and the pollution that this exploitation will generate). The same would apply to agriculture. Its yields have shown no sign of decline. But the authors of the Report now argue that this growth in productivity cannot last: ‘the increase in food production has been achieved at the cost of policies that have ravaged soils, water resources, forests and ecosystems, which will make any future increase in production more difficult [28]’. We therefore always come back to the idea that there are always reasons for collapse to occur.
In 2019, almost twenty years after this update of the Report, Dennis Meadows still took the same stance. In an interview with Libération, he again maintained that ‘the collapse scenario is the one that prevails’, but this time mainly because of global warming: ‘I know that climate change, combined with the depletion of cheap fossil fuels over the course of this century, will eliminate the foundations of our industrial civilisation. I don’t know whether it will eliminate our species – probably not, even though there will be billions fewer people on this planet by 2100 [29].’ Then, in his preface to the 2021 reissue of the Report, in French, he announced that collapse was imminent, declaring that ‘it is the current generation that will suffer the major traumas due to the various forces that will cause the decline of the population and of productive capital [30]’. Still invoking the need for the human population to decrease, he observes that ‘attempts to reduce fertility are less and less accepted politically’. But, still in the grip of his catastrophist vision, he imagines that mortality will rise and, in a remark with a conspiratorial tone, he maintains that this rise is, moreover, expected: ‘Those who oppose efforts to reduce fertility are implicitly choosing to rely on an increase in the death rate to bring about a transition that is inevitable in any case’. Finally, true to his approach, he argues that this growth in mortality will come from a fall in production caused by ‘climate change, technological obsolescence, and war [31]’. This last sentence perfectly illustrates the Malthusian approach, which treats war as a factor in reducing the population. Meadows even reveals a certain misanthropy when he declares that the ‘physical growth of the population and of the exploitation of resources is the cancer of our planet [32]’. In other words, any development of humanity should be banished.
A pseudo-confirmation
Despite its methodological problems and its prediction errors, the Report has nevertheless enjoyed a certain aura for fifty years. It even regained additional credibility following two articles by the physicist Graham Turner, one published in 2008 and the other in 2012. In them, this researcher assesses the analyses of the Report, first up to 2000, then up to 2010. According to the editor of the second article in book form, ‘Turner’s results represent a significant degree of validation of the model’ used for the Report [33]. This commentator even adds that this work gives ‘greater weight and credibility to the thesis of the collapse of industrial society’ and that, by ‘validating the Meadows Report’, Turner convinced many people that this collapse was imminent. He also considers that this work is ‘the foundation of contemporary collapse theses that have been flourishing in recent years [34]’. This seems entirely justified to him since, in his view, ‘collapse is [already] under way and almost inevitable [35]’. It could even be more abrupt and faster than the Report predicted [36].
It must be said that, in his articles, Graham Turner expresses little doubt about the relevance of the Report and the risks of collapse. For example, in the 2008 article, he writes ‘that 30 years of historical data compare favourably with the main features of a business-as-usual scenario called the “standard scenario”, which leads to the collapse of the global system in the middle of the 21st century [37]’. Then, he disputes some of the criticisms levelled at the 1972 Report, notably those concerning the prediction errors on raw materials (silver, tungsten, mercury, etc.). Turner retorts that the Report merely reproduced the estimates of the United States Bureau of Mines [38]. That is true. But the Report presented them without much critical distance, which suggests that it gave them credit. Still regarding these resources, Turner also reproaches the critics for focusing on the pessimistic estimates and failing to take into account more optimistic data, also from the Bureau of Mines. Here again, it is true that the Report also relayed estimates from the same Bureau of Mines according to which reserves could be multiplied by five. But, on the assumption that consumption continued to grow, the Report still came to the conclusion that gold reserves would be exhausted in 29 years (that is, in 2001), mercury reserves in 41 years (in 2013), silver reserves in 42 years (in 2014), tin reserves in 61 years (in 2033), and so on. Turner is therefore rather charitable towards the Report.
Another point on which Turner passes over the Report’s shortcomings in silence is pollution. The Report adopted an aggregated approach to it, that is, it did not distinguish between different types of pollution but considered a single variable for pollution in general. We mentioned above that the assumption that it grows with economic activity was problematic, even false. Yet Turner does not mention this problem and decides to treat as pollution only CO2, the quantity of which in the atmosphere is, in his view, supposed to grow continuously with industrial activity. This idea is questionable insofar as CO2 is not in itself pollution. It is a necessary ingredient of photosynthesis and therefore of life on Earth. Admittedly, in excessive quantities, its presence in the atmosphere causes global warming, which can be problematic for society. But Turner does not take into account current efforts to reduce emissions while maintaining economic activity. This approach is beginning to work, as the decoupling observed in developed countries shows. Finally, one may note that this focus on a new ‘pollutant’ amounts to implicitly saying that, on this question, the Report’s approach was not the right one.
More fundamentally, if Turner confirms the Report, it is because he reproduces the same methodological error. Admittedly, he is not a strict Malthusian, insofar as he considers that, during the 20th century, ‘the increase in population and in the demand for material wealth leads to an increase in industrial output, which grows at a faster rate than the population [39]’. However, his Malthusian streak shows through when he considers that it is the growing difficulties in obtaining the energy needed for this industrial output that will cause its drastic fall. Above all, in 2012, he ventures to predict that ‘real industrial output per capita begins to fall sharply, from around 2015, while pollution from industrial activity continues to grow. [This leads to] a fall in agricultural yields and in food production per capita. [Then] a rise in the death rate from around 2020. […] The world population therefore declines, at a rate of around half a billion per decade, from around 2030 [40].’ We are not in 2030, but there is no need to stress that, in 2024, this sudden decline had not been observed, and it is not certain that it is looming on the horizon. Far from confirming the Report, Turner’s articles therefore simply extend its lack of caution [41].
This recklessness stems, once again, from the idea that society is incapable of sustaining its own growth, not only in the long term but also in the short term. Hence the predictions of a relatively imminent collapse. Even when some of them prove erroneous, their authors seem to find it hard to acknowledge that their approach to the evolution of society is problematic. A very fine illustration of this blindness is provided by one of the authors of the Report, Jorgen Randers. In 2012, he begins by acknowledging that the Report was mistaken and that its critics were therefore right: ‘many of the critics [of the Report] thought that “technology” would be able to solve any resource crisis by providing substitutes for any resource that ran short – in time and without a decline in human well-being. By and large, the evidence has so far proved them right: the world is not yet running short of the most critical resources – fossil fuels, crops, water, fertiliser.’ Yet Randers cannot help but consider that the world can only go from bad to worse because of economic development. He writes: ‘Nevertheless, the threats are intensifying, chiefly to global biodiversity, for example the coral reef and ancient forests.’ In short, there is always something wrong. Hence his conclusion: ‘the real world has evolved as foreseen’ by the Report [42]. In other words, even when the Report is wrong, it is right.
The illusions of equilibrium
That the Report was mistaken about the prospects of collapse does not mean that society can grow indefinitely. It may be that, one day, resource depletion or an ecological catastrophe caused by industrial activity will push human society into a phase of more or less rapid degrowth, if not collapse. But even if that is what awaits humanity, it is very difficult to know in advance when this limit to growth will be reached. So far, human ingenuity has shown a great capacity to overcome the challenges it has faced. It could therefore push back the Earth’s limits for decades, even centuries, notably by providing access to the resources of the seabed or of asteroids, while curbing the pollution and environmental destruction that all industrial activities cause. It may even be that the notion of limits is an illusion. Indeed, in the history of humanity, it is not a lack of resources that has limited its development, but a lack of knowledge. Yet knowledge is potentially infinite. If humanity therefore manages to sustain the development of scientific research, as it has done for about two centuries, it may well continue to grow for millennia.
Finally, the Report’s ultimate error may be to believe that society can reach a state of equilibrium in terms of population and productivity. For the Report, this is the only way it can avoid collapse. But zero growth in population and production is not very realistic. True, in a computer model, this prospect gives the impression of possible stability. But the stability obtained comes only from the fact that it is assumed at the outset. Here again, the result lies in the hypothesis. Yet, socially, it is very difficult to stabilise both the size of the population and the level of economic activity. Indeed, only a coercive policy could force a population to limit its birth rate to the strict replacement level. Besides the ethical problems such a policy would raise, the historical examples in this direction are not very conclusive. The same goes for economic activity. How can entrepreneurs be made not to seek to develop their businesses? If they do not innovate and do not try to win over potential customers, they risk being overtaken by competitors. It is of course possible to imagine a society where economic activity would be controlled by a central state, which would ensure that it never began to grow. But here again, examples of planned economies have hardly been convincing. In the end, the Meadows Report errs in underestimating humanity’s ability to meet the technical challenges it faces and overestimating its ability to control its development. It is therefore far from certain that it is very useful for thinking about the future.
References
[1] Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W. W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, p. 23.
[2] Freeman, C. (1973). ‘Malthus with a computer’. In H. S. D. Cole, C. Freeman, M. Jahoda and K. L. R. Pavitt (eds), Models of Doom. A Critique of The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, p. 8.
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
[4] Ibid., p. 227.
[5] Ritchie, H. (14 April 2017). ‘Air pollution: does it get worse before it gets better?’. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/air-pollution-does-it-get-worse-before…
[6] Ritchie, H. (11 January 2022). ‘Many countries have achieved an impressive reduction in lead poisoning’. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/decline-lead-poisoning
[7] Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. (November 2019). ‘Outdoor Air Pollution’. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/outdoor-air-pollution
[8] Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, op. cit., p. 67.
[9] Eyl-Mazzega, M.-A. (November 2023). ‘Le pic de la production pétrolière est hypothétique, on ne l’atteindra sans doute jamais’. Pour la Science, special issue no. 121 (Quelles énergies pour demain ?). pourlascience.fr/sr/entretien/le-pic-de-la-production-pet…
[10] Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, op. cit., p. 51.
[11] Ibid., p. 51.
[12] Ibid., p. 52.
[13] Ausubel, J. H., Wernick, I. K. and Waggoner, P. E. (2013). ‘Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing’. Population and Development Review, 38(s1), 221-242. doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00561.x
[14] Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L. and Randers, J. (2021 [2004]). Les Limites à la croissance (dans un monde fini). Rue de l’échiquier, pp. 22-23.
[15] Ibid., p. 23.
[16] Ibid., p. 55.
[17] Ibid., p. 26.
[18] Ibid., p. 35.
[19] Ibid., p. 110.
[20] Ibid., p. 170.
[21] Ibid., p. 171.
[22] Ibid., p. 173.
[23] Ibid., p. 174.
[24] Ibid., p. 196.
[25] Ibid., p. 193.
[26] Ibid., p. 190.
[27] Ibid., p. 196.
[28] Ibid., p. 102.
[29] Dennis Meadows in Coralie Schaub and Aude Massiot, ‘Effondrement : l’humanité rongée par la fin’, Libération, 29 July 2019. liberation.fr/planete/2019/07/29/effondrement-l-humanite-…
[30] Dennis Meadows, ‘Préface à l’édition des 50 ans’, in Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows and Jorgen Randers, Les Limites à la croissance, op. cit., 2021, p. 8.
[31] Ibid., p. 9.
[32] Ibid., p. 10.
[33] Salerno, G. (2021). ‘Présentation’. In G. Turner, Aux origines de l’effondrement (translated from English, introduced and annotated by G. Salerno). PUF, p. 17.
[34] Gabriel Salerno, ‘Turner et les thèses de l’effondrement de la société industrielle’, in Graham Turner, Aux origines de l’effondrement, op. cit., p. 89.
[35] Ibid., p. 79.
[36] Ibid., p. 88.
[37] Turner, G. M. (2008). ‘A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality’. Global Environmental Change, 18(3), 397-411, p. 397. doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.05.001
[38] Graham Turner, 2008, p. 401.
[39] Turner, G. M. (2012). ‘On the Cusp of Global Collapse? Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data’. GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 21(2), 116-124, p. 120. doi.org/10.14512/gaia.21.2.10
[40] Graham Turner, 2012, p. 121.
[41] Note that a new update of the computer model (World3) used by the Report is somewhat more cautious. Its author, Gaya Herrington, writes: ‘At this stage, the data […] indicate a slowdown and eventual halt in growth within the next decade, but World3 does not specify whether the ensuing decline will constitute a collapse.’ See Gaya Herrington, ‘Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2020, pp. 10-11. doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13084
[42] Jorgen Randers, ‘The Real Message of The Limits to Growth. A Plea for Forward-Looking Global Policy’, GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 21(2), 2012, pp. 102-105 (doi.org/10.14512/gaia.21.2.7). French translation: ‘Le point de vue d’un co-auteur : Que nous disait réellement Halte à la croissance ?’, Mondes en décroissance, 1, April 2023. revues-msh.uca.fr/revue-opcd/index.php?id=230
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