Vogt | Limits to Growth

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

Pending environmental disaster mandates revolution from above and below

“Faced with this emergency, the time is not for half measures. The time is
for a revolution—a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of the economy,
a revolution of political action.”
(Jacques Chirac on climate change, February 2007).

Roland Vogt | Who among the group of
protestors that occupied a construction
site in Marckolsheim, France, in 1974
would have imagined that 33 years
later the president of France would
declare that the planetary environmen-
tal crisis called for a revolution?
Marckolsheim, on the French side
of the River Rhine where Switzer-
land, France, and Germany converge,
was the location of Europe’s first non-
violent, crossborder ecological cam-
paign to prevent a major, hazardous
industrial project. After a four-month
occupation of the building site by
hundreds of multinational activists,
the French government actually pro-
hibited construction of the planned
chemical plant.
This breakthrough was a success
for the Alemanns and the environ-
ment alike, since the plant’s smoke-
stacks would have annually blown
nine tons of lead into the surrounding
environment—in the immediate vi-
cinity of the Kaiserstuhl vineyards.
The plant’s defeat also turned out to
be undeservedly fortunate for the
firm behind the project, the Munich
Chemical Works, which had wanted
to manufacture stabilizers for polyvi-
nyl chloride (PVC) and other plas-
tics—products no longer used today.
The investment would almost cer-
tainly have been a financial loss. In Donella H.
this way, the young international en- Meadows, Jorgen
Randers, and
vironmental movement prevented an Dennis L. Meadows:
economic flop. Moreover, the Marck- Limits to Growth:
olsheim occupation served as the The 30-Year
Update. Chelsea
dress rehearsal for the resistance to Green Publishing,
building a nuclear power plant in 2004.
Wyhl, on the German side of the
Rhine just two miles away. The 1975
occupation of the Wyhl site marked
the beginning of the movement against
nuclear energy in West Germany—
one of the powerful “new social move-
ments” in the Federal Republic that
would mobilize hundreds of thou-
sands of people and eventually be-
come the biggest democratic, mass
movement in German history.

IP • Spring • 2007 Global Issues 105

 Vogt | Limits to Growth
Opposition in the Rhine region
was fueled not only by the danger that
such projects posed to the economic
situation of affected populations. Con-
cerns about health and survival were
also powerful motivators. People were
aware at the time that in other indus-
trial locations cows had keeled over
dead near chemical plants and that
the incidence of cancer, especially
childhood leukemia, was higher in the
proximity of nuclear activity due to
exposure to low levels of radiation.
These concerns explain the tenacity
of the resistance.
An important factor that contrib-
uted to the emergence of the West Ger-
man environmental movement—and
other environmental movements
around the world—was a 1972 report
entitled The Limits to Growth, commis-
sioned by the Club of Rome, a global
think tank. The report illustrated the
finite nature of the world’s nonrenew-
able raw materials. According to sce-
narios compiled by a US-British-Ger-
man team of economists and natural
scientists (Dennis and Donella Mead-
ows, Erich Zahn, and Peter Milling),
should the trends of growth-driven
economic practices continue, the
world’s natural resources would be ei-
ther almost exhausted or prohibitively
expensive around the turn of the mil-
Donella H. lennium. The report was hugely influ-
Meadows and ential at the time, translated into doz-
Jorgen Randers:
Beyond the Limits: ens of languages and read by millions.
Confronting Global It came just a year before the world-
Collapse, wide energy crisis.
Envisioning a
Twenty years later, in 1992, the
Sustainable Future.
Chelsea Green authors adjusted their calculations in
Publishing, 1992. Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global
Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Fu-
ture. But the underlying thesis re-
mained much the same: nonrenewable
106 Global Issues
resources will be depleted in the fore-
seeable future. In 2000 Dennis Mead-
ows published a position paper argu-
ing that it was no longer possible to
achieve stable conditions based on the
current global population. These mod-
els maintain that exponential growth
contributes to the destruction of in-
dustries, species, and habitats, leading
to economic and social crises.
The recent Limits to Growth: The
30-Year Update maps scenarios of pos-
sible developments through 2100.
Using extensive computer models
based on population, food production,
pollution and other data, the authors
demonstrate why the world is in a
potentially dangerous “overshoot”
situation. The main argument, simply
put, is that humans have been steadily
using up more of the Earth’s resources
without replenishing them; the conse-
quences may be catastrophic.
Most computer-generated scenari-
os indicate that the limits to growth
will be exceeded and that collapse will
ensue by 2100, at the latest. If humans
simply persist in the behavior and
economic practices of the past 30
years, there will be an economic and
environmental collapse by 2030
caused by the decreasing availability
of raw materials and the increase in
climate-related natural disasters. In
many cases even rigorous implemen-
tation of environmental protection
and efficiency standards will only de-
crease this trend, not prevent it. With
a global population of nearly 8 billion,
society as we know it—characterized
by sustainable economic activity and a
high standard of living—emerges only
in the computer simulation of an ex-
tremely ambitious mix of reigning in
consumption, controlling population
IP • Spring • 2007

growth, reducing noxious emissions,
and introducing numerous other con-
trol measures. Judging by the wasted
interval between the first report to the
Club of Rome and the 30-year update,
this optimistic outcome is probably
unachievable.
The three Club of Rome reports
throw shocking light on industrial so-
ciety and its addiction to exponential
growth. A new kind of ecological en-
lightenment must, however, go beyond
Immanuel Kant’s motto, “dare to
know” to the more action-oriented
directive, “dare to have the courage to
use your own reason.” The second
step of enlightenment is attained if
people have the courage to recognize
the undeniable linkages between
human activity and climate change,
and act accordingly to rectify the envi-
ronmental damage. This includes tak-
ing action even if it means sacrificing
personal comforts.
With humanity facing what could
be the greatest catastrophe in human
history, it is remarkable that the “rev-
olution in political action” declared by
French President Chirac goes only as
far as a UN suborganization for the
environment. With the hole in the
ozone layer and the warming of the
climate both on the rise, humans are
confronting the greatest security risk
imaginable.
The revolutionary breakthrough
in Paris was above all the realization
that the looming climatic catastrophe
is, with 90 percent certainty, the re-
sult of human activity and, second-
arily, that it can still be averted.
IP • Spring • 2007
Vogt | Limits to Growth
The awareness that this window
of opportunity exists, yet could be al-
lowed to close due to the inertia of
politicians and the poor performance
of existing international institutions,
warrants a global state of emergency
and ought to be declared such by the
UN Security Council. There ought to
be a world environmental authority
with locally operational agencies, in-
vested with wide-ranging powers to
intervene in support of required cli-
mate-change measures in countries
that do not or cannot ensure compli-
ance with global standards. This au-
thority should be flanked by an inter-
national court with powers to impose
heavy sanctions on states and compa-
nies that willfully disregard environ-
mental standards.
If these measures are not imple-
mented successfully, the only remain-
ing hope is peaceful worldwide upris-
ings aimed at compelling the neces-
sary political action by means of pres-
sure from below. Environmental
movements—in Marckolsheim, Wyhl,
and elsewhere—have repeatedly dem-
onstrated the political potential of
nonviolent mass protest.
Roland Vogt is a former member of the
German parliament, a cofounder of the
German Green Party, and former member of
the national executive boards of the Federal
Association of Citizen Action Groups for
Environmental Protection and the German
Greens.
Global Issues 107