This past week I read several articles exploring Gaya Herrington’s recent analysis of The Limits to Growth, the groundbreaking research by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III in 1972. The worrisome but not so surprising conclusion? We’re following their projections almost exactly.
Herrington is not the first scientist to update the Limits to Growth research. In fact the authors, themselves, wrote a 20-year and 30-year update. But Herrington’s work is timely, considering large parts of Siberia and the western US ablaze, the brutal droughts in Iran and Madagascar, the record-breaking temperatures around the world, and the fact that parts of the Amazon are now releasing rather than sequestering carbon (not to mention the many other clear signs of the rapid breakdown of the climate system), all while humans try hard to resume their consumer lifestyles [post]-pandemic.[ii]
As Herrington’s analysis explores, it’s not limited resources but Gaia’s limited capacity to absorb all our waste products that is doing us in. Our continual dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is like that famous scene from War of the Roses, when Kathleen Turner locks Michael Douglas in the sauna. We’re quickly cooking ourselves to death. If we just let go of our pride and amicably fixed our relationship, we might be ok—but out of spite or stupidity, we carry on, pissing on Gaia’s fish, forgetting that she’s the one with the monster truck. And beyond messing with the climate, we’re also poisoning our water, despoiling our earth, riddling our oceans with plastic and nitrogen, and acidifying them with CO2, and cutting down trees to wipe our asses, grow more soy and cattle, and build more (and too often second) homes.
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