Wisconsin Public Television University Place  From the Age of Abundance to the Age of Scarcity  Donald Worster  04/16/12 UP750  cc >> Donald Worster is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American history at the University of Kansas. He is one of the founders of, and leaders in, the field of environmental history. His early books, such as Nature's Economy, Dust Bowl, and Rivers of Empire have become classics in the field. Offering reader and scholars that followed, including myself, a model of understanding how changing ideas and beliefs, systems of political economy, and the dynamic forces of the natural world have shaped relationships between people and environment over time. Past president of the American Society for Environmental History and a recipient of distinguished awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of the Bancroft Prize in American history, Donald Worster received his Ph.D in American history and literature from Yale University. His most recent books include, A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, a must-read for anyone wishing to understand one of Wisconsin's eminent environmental thinkers. As well as, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. Professor Worster is currently evaluating the American response to the limits to growth debate, and that will be the topic of his next book. His lecture today is entitled, "Facing Limits: From the Age of Abundance to the Age of Scarcity." Please join me in welcoming Donald Worster. [applause]  >> You come to Wisconsin to talk about the environment and you are on sacred ground, right? As I know from writing books about John Wesley Powell. 

Oh, I see, okay, good. He actually lived for awhile on the southern edge of this state. And of course, John Muir, as well. Past and present greats in the field of environmental studies and environmental history. It's great pleasure to be here this morning. I perhaps should change the subtitle of this from "The Age of Abundance to the Age of Happiness." That sounds a lot better than "The Age of Scarcity." I don't like that word myself. Let's just assume we can change it. I'm looking at this machine to see whether I know how to advance it.  I pushed the buttons in all directions and it's not quite working.  The question I want to raise this morning is, is the age of abundance and infinite growth now coming to and end? Has an age of limits and equilibrium begun, an age that may last for decades or centuries. 

How did you do that? Because I've got to do it with this. Or do you want me to use that and not this other thing?  All right. This technology always gets in the way. That's part of my talk today.  This mysterious hand, come on up here and just stand by me. [laughter]  Limits of population growth, limits of soils and food production, limits of energy consumption, limits of the natural world, all confront us with persistent urgency. A shift of attitude seems to be underway, but it is not going to be easy to change our thinking. Already lots of people are sounding angry, fearful, full of resentment. "Where's mine?" they want to know. "Where is the land of plenty I was promised?" The promise is now 500 years old. 

As you see on the screen. Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, a vast hemisphere, covering nearly 11 billion acres, equal to all of Asia, fell into the hands of Western Europeans. Add in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which became hunting ground for European commerce, the resources available to people all across Europe suddenly became staggeringly large. The British economist, Adam Smith, declared, in a sentence that is buried in the back of his book but I think is worth bringing to the forefront, "The discovery of America, and that of a passage from the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of Mankind." The Cape put the labor of Africa, India, and other nations to work for Europeans, but the discovery of America put the natural resources of an entire hemisphere at their disposal. Call it then, not merely the New World, call it a second world, a second Earth. I think that's very much suggested by this map that appears in the year 1587. Just look how they have depicted the new Earth, the globe. It's not just one world, it's two worlds, two Earths, in effect. Today one billion people live in that second Earth of the Americas, one-seventh of the world's population. Many of those people live poor, not rich, lives. 

Whatever abundance the second world, the second Earth offered, it was not equally distributed over space. Some nations in the Americas ended up with a vast bounty of great soil, others did not. Some were blessed, or cursed, with copper, gold, silver mines, while others were not. Some enjoyed lots of water. Others suffered from too much heat, or ice. Thus some of the new nations, Haiti, for example, ended up with very little they could use. They have degraded what little they had. They are still looking for their paradise. Other new nations, the United States especially, ended up with lots of unspoiled country, the best piece of real estate anywhere. Although we too have degraded, or depleted, much of it. 

But for all these differences, there was one, and only one, New World. One unexploited hemisphere, teaming with a wealth of natural resources. Following its acquisition by the Europeans, a long economic boom began that would bring a greater abundance to every corner of the world, from China to Africa. For in the process of seizing on the windfall of the New World, everyone's way of life changed dramatically, starting a process that has led to today's globalization. A scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the capitalist revolution, the French revolution, and all the political revolutions of the Americas, Asia, Africa, have followed in the wake of the New World, second Earth, abundance. And the raising expectations it generated. Most important of all, Europeans and Americans began to believe in the possibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. Eventually, the rest of the world would come to share that belief. Or should we call it, that illusion. For some time now, evidence has been piling up that the boom may be over. 

Nowhere is a shift from abundance to new kinds of scarcity more obvious than in the United States. Once this nation enjoyed a super-abundance of fertile soils, forests, minerals, waters, that would help make it the richest and the most powerful in history. Some of that abundance still remains, but even it is increasingly fought over. Now Americans must import heavily from somewhere else to maintain their style of life. We are an import nation. The new reality is not simply one of too many people struggling over a diminished supply of commodities. We are bumping up against a new kind of limits that we never understood before, the vulnerability of the Earth's interlinked systems. This kind of limit has only been possible to understand, or to measure, through the efforts of modern science. Many of those systems, natural scientists agree, are in danger of collapsing with unpredictable consequences. So I get the growing popularity of the rather inadequate word, sustainability. 

Whatever the word means, and no one is quite sure, it's ubiquity suggests that the 500 year old boom is over. The task ahead is to find ways of living securely and justly within the limits of one, single, vulnerable Earth. An awareness of this new reality can be traced back to the late 1940's and 1950's. Most dramatically, to the first Earth Day in 1970. But this morning I want to talk about a little book that provoked a big controversy. It was published, as Greg said, 40 years ago, under the title, The Limits to Growth. It's authors, Donella, also known as Dana, and Dennis Meadows, seemed to come out of nowhere to ignite a virulent debate. That debate is not over. In fact, it seems to have become one of the central debates of our time. Let me introduce the characters behind this controversy. 

Unfortunately, I've got my order backwards. If you look on the left you have the whole array of the authors of The Limits to Growth on the stage, except Donella who is hidden behind the podium. So I put her picture up beside them. On the left, you have the youngest of the group, this guy, William Behrens. He was an undergraduate at MIT when The Limits project began. He now lives on a farm in Maine, far away from the halls of controversy. The second of the authors, actually the last in the list because these were the two research assistants who were put on the list of the key authors, was Jorgen Randers. Jorgen Randers was the son of Norway's nuclear energy program. He completed his doctorate at MIT one year after the book was published. One of the two main authors of the book was Dennis Meadows. 

He graduated from MIT Sloan School of Management. He's still very much alive today. He retired from the University of New Hampshire. He continues to speak out on global issues. And finally the person who actually wrote the text, and it's not a very long text, probably 50 pages, when you take it out of the whole book with all the graphs and charts, is this woman, Donella Meadows. She was born in 1941 in Illinois, she earned a Ph.D in biophysics at Harvard, subsequently taught at Dartmouth College. She founded the Sustainability Institute. Then in 2007, died at a rather young age. They seem an improbable group of people to write one of the defining works of modern environmental thinking. They were all students or recent students, all nerdy in style, and all new issues of conservation and environment. 

I have corresponded Randers in particular, and he says he'd never heard of Rachel Carson. He'd not read Aldo Leopold, all these great classics of the Americas. He was fairly new to these issues when he was at MIT. Dana's dissertation at Harvard was on bovine pancreatic ribonuclease. Dennis wrote just as densely on hog market cycles. They met as undergraduates at Carleton College in Minnesota and went off to Massachusetts for graduate degrees. Those were their topics. Suddenly they leap from these barnyard themes to the central, long-term problems threatening the survival of civilization. Briefly, these are the events leading up to the commissioning of the writing of The Limits to Growth. In 1968 an Italian industrialist, Aurelio Peccei, who had lived in China and South America and come to sympathize with third-world desires for economic development, met a Scot named Alexander King, the top science advisor for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. 

The OECD was dedicated to promoting market capitalism, but King had become increasingly skeptical of that organization and of its devotion to endless growth. Like Peccei, he was worried about a long list of problems including environmental degradation, inequalities of wealth and power, and the growing potential for conflict over resources. They formed the Club of Rome to promote the view, in their words, "We cannot expect technological solutions alone to get us out of the vicious circle." In July, 1970, Peccei, King and other Club members assembled on the MIT campus for a seminar with Professor Jay Forrester. An electrical engineer and the father of Systems Dynamics, Forrester had followed a long, rambling path toward his ultimate work of building computer models of complex social systems, models that would allow us to understand how diverse variables might interact with each other, and to experiment with different outcomes. For the seminar, he inscribed on a bed sheet, draped on a wall, his model of a world system. It was a complicated schematic linking such variable as population, capital investment, natural resources, pollution, and food production. For the first times, sitting around this seminar, Club members felt they could visualize the wild chaos of the modern world. They were not technocrats hoping to rule that world. This is a common misapprehension. Instead, they were seeking a more comprehensive understanding of the global predicament that more narrowly focused experts and short-term-minded politicians had offered. 

In the summer of 1970, Dennis and Dana Meadows arrived back in Cambridge just in time to sit in on the seminar. They had missed the first Earth Day by a few months, but they became caught up in the aftermath of ideas. The two of them had spend nearly a year driving a Land Rover, bought with every shilling they could scrape together, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India. They'd intended to go climbing mountains and seeing exotic places, but along the way they discovered global poverty, injustice, environmental destruction. In her unpublished memoir Dana writes, I started the trip a child of the Sputnik age, a technological optimist, a scientist-in-training. I thought science could solve all problems. We didn't have to drive very far east into Asia to run into problems that my nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer couldn't solve. For the first time in our lives we were face to face with malnourished children and kids with the open sores of smallpox. We saw beggars, and houses collapsed by earthquakes, and sewage running in open drains alongside streets. In the Indus Valley we saw galloping soil erosion. 

In Sri Lanka we saw the beginnings of a massive hydro- dam that would flood out square miles of jungle. We also saw dancing and singing, beautiful handicrafts, simple but ingenious native technologies, and ceremonies of deep spirituality. We began to wonder about the causes and consequences of poverty and development, population growth, erosion, deforestation. As the Land Rover bounced painfully across the miles of dusty desert, we tried to make sense of what we were seeing. They came back deeply moved by these travels, and were ready to ask how the world might find it's way to peace and equilibrium. Forrester had other projects in mind, so the Club hired Dennis, the new Ph.D, who with Dana's unpaid assistance, began gathering data, building a computer model, and writing a report. They drew on their advisor's computer model, renamed World Three, and also on his general perspective. Forrester was a self-proclaimed Malthusian. His sense of environmental limits was strong. But I think it was derived, from what I've read of his many writings, less from his environmental reading than from his growing up on a cattle ranch in the Sandhills of Nebraska. 

Nature, he felt in his bones, sets limits to human aspirations. He called that view Malthusian, but it bore only a loose resemblance to the ideas of the controversial economist. In his book on the principles of population, published in 1798, Malthus had posited a tendency in all species to reproduce faster than the food supply. From that he concluded the inevitable result, without birth control or abstinence, must be a bitter struggle for survival, and starvation for many. Forrester and his MIT students were not making exactly that argument, nor did they blame the poor of the world for the world's environmental decline. Instead what they were saying was that growth in population, in consumption and in pollution could not continue forever on a finite planet. Their view of nature was radically different. "It is not known," they wrote in The Limits to Growth, "how much we can perturb the natural ecological balance of the earth. Malthus was never worried about disturbing the ecological balance of the earth. Something new had entered the conversation. 

The vision of a delicately balanced planet that was highly susceptible to disruption and dis-equilibrium. This is the kind of computer model, which is so much more complex than anything Malthus was thinking about. If the present growth trends in the world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, and it's that whole list that we have to keep in mind, 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. Where is this idea coming from? Well, I think it comes from a number of sources, but particularly from the new science of ecology. Although it had been around for decades, only in the post-World War II era, did ecology begin to alter popular perceptions. In writing their report the Meadows turned to a number of prominent ecologists, like Eugene Odum and G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale. Both saw nature as a series of interrelated interactive systems adding up to a single complex biosphere. As Hutchinson put it, "There is reasonably objective evidence that the length of life of the biosphere as an inhabitable region for organisms is to be measured in decades rather than in hundreds of millions of years. 

This is entirely the fault of our own species." What the MIT group took from Malthus and from ecologists was the unsustainablity of exponential growth. In fact the first two chapters of The Limits to Growth are basically about that, the nature of exponential growth, the limits of exponential growth. The Limits to Growth, and this is I think another common misapprehension, did not offer a set of predictions about what will happen. In fact, I think one mistake they made was to put any dates at all into this picture. Then people began to say, oh, you say that in the year 2010 this will happen, and in the year 2060, and so forth. What they offered instead was a set of scenarios about where the world might be headed if it did not change course. No one could dispute that all five trends were like locomotives hurtling down different tracks at faster and faster speeds. Or that they were bound to converge at some point. Few denied that these trains must be stopped, of at least some of them must be stopped, or slowed. Pollution for example, or world population growth. 

But what they did dispute was the authors recommendation to stop dead in its tracks, one train in particular, the train marked industrialization. It was pulling boxcars full of money and consumer goods. Aurelio Peccei was so struck by the data and the logic of the report that the Meadows turned in that he urged to be published quickly and distributed as widely as possible. In March, 1972, almost exactly 40 years ago, the Potomac Association in Washington, D.C. brought out the slender book of 200 pages with all those graphs and charts, and as Greg said, it made a huge impact. He said 30 million. I've seen many figures on this, 12 million, I'll take 30. It was translated into 37 languages, making it probably the biggest selling environmental work of the modern era. The book not only sold, it stirred up a great deal of anger. Looking back on what followed, Dana wrote, "We could not understand the intensity of the reaction our book provoked. 

It seemed to us far out of proportion to our simple statement that the Earth is finite and cannot support exponential growth for very long. For the life of me--" She says, "I was trying to ensure that future would be decent for people everywhere. For the life of me, I couldn't see what was wrong with that." What was wrong was that the MIT group had challenged perhaps the central article of faith among secular elites on the Left and on the Right all over the world. That that exponential growth is good, that it poses few risks or problems, that it is absolutely necessary for the future of Mankind. Most reviewers of the book, including in economic and business circles, acknowledged that the Earth is obviously finite and that someday all societies will have to deal with the fact. But the nearly universal response among that circle of critics was that the limits were a long way off, and that exponential growth could continue into the future as far as anybody could see. Let me just cite a few of the economists who reacted to this book. Carl Kaysen, for example, who was advisor to President John Kennedy, wrote in Foreign Affaires, "The problems they call attention to are real and pressing, but none are of the degree of immediacy that can rightly command the urgency they feel." A long way off. Yale economist Henry Wallich dismissed the book in, I think it was, Newsweek magazine, "as a piece of irresponsible nonsense." His colleague, William Nordhaus, complained about reviving the spirit of Malthus and denounced the MIT group for predicting an "end to economic progress." Progress that the West has experienced since the Industrial Revolution. Those weren't the only views coming out of economics departments. 

John Kenneth Galbraith was far less hostile. Since the 1950's he had been questioning the affluent society. Asking whether "our great appetite for materials, if it continues," he said, "in it's geometric course, will not one day have to be restrained. This is," he quipped, "the forbidden question." Over it hangs nearly a total silence. And that other economist who responded very favorably to the book, Kenneth Boulding, basically said, "Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." But why the widespread hostility among many economists to The Limits to Growth? We can say that many felt their expertise had been invaded. But to be as generous as possible, I think it was because they saw themselves as promoting human welfare through showing the way to economic growth. The Limits came as a threat to that mission. "Since we believe that brute poverty is still a major problem for most people in the world," wrote Britain's Christopher Freeman, "and since, in general, we do not believe that the physical constraints are quite as pressing as the MIT team suggest, we do not accept their enthusiastic endorsement of zero growth as the ideal for the world." The harsh face of global poverty was constantly invoked as justification for expending the world's economy. Only through growth could the poor be fed and housed. The only alternative was to confiscate and redistribute existing wealth more evenly. 

That alternative was viewed as impractical, unethical and unwise. It was impractical because it would never work. The rich would never give up their sumptuous dinners or their high-energy way of life. It was unethical because it would require and authoritarian state, ruled by military dictators or party cadres to carry out the redistribution. It was unwise because it would kill all progress, moral as well as economic. In short, economic growth was defended chiefly on grounds that, not that it was physically possible, or environmentally possible, but as the Australian economist -- put it, that it was desirable. You can't have it any other way. Nature will have to cooperate. I think economists, like all of us, operate out of moral world views. One economist has described that as "the classical Liberal utilitarian viewpoint that is utterly homocentric." That is, helping people become better off, as he puts it, as least in terms of their own perceptions. 

It's their mission. That little qualifying phrase, "in terms of their own perceptions," is worth noting. If people perceive themselves as being poor, no matter how many automobiles are sitting in there garage, it's not the economists job to persuade them otherwise. Nobody has a right to tell anybody else to have fewer children or to consume less. Ultimately, in this way of thinking, the Earth has mainly utilitarian value. It's simply there to satisfy human wants no matter whether they're limited or whether they're infinite. So what can you do when the green light of an unspoiled continent has faded, when nature no longer seems to offer the abundance it once did? You begin to do what engineers, businessmen, economists and others began to argue was missing from the MIT graphs and charts, a dynamic promise of technology. If people, pollution and consumption can all grow exponentially, then so can technology. Technology would allow us to keep up with all the runaway trends. This became, and still is today, a central issue under debate. 

Is technology, the product of the human brain, up to the task of meeting all our needs, and at the same time not undermining the fragile systems of the planet? Can technology create another New World, as good as the first one? Often the technological optimist did not argue so grandly that human ingenuity can create a new Earth, instead they focused on more narrow issues. Can technology overcome the depletion of non-renewable resources like the fossil fuels? The MIT team had calculated that growing consumption would lead, within less than 100 years, to the exhaustion of such vital resources as aluminum, copper, lead, tungsten, tin, mercury, natural gas, petroleum. Not so, argued the critics. None of these resources was truly in short supply. And even if they were, a substitute could always be found. The economist Robert Solow at MIT went so far as to say, "The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe." What he meant was that natural resources needed in the past would no longer be needed in the future. Or as the grand master of post-war resource economics, Harold Barnett put it, "Atoms and molecules and their energies, not fields and trees and fossils, are the building blocks of our time." That is, engineers can take those atoms and molecules and their energies and create an infinite supply of resources. One of the most sweeping rebuttals of The Limits to Growth came from two scientists at Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, -- and Alvin Weinberg. They write, "We are cornucopias." Even in this era of dwindling resources, and in spite of dire predictions, rather than accepting to coming age of limits, they heralded the coming age of infinite substitutability. They predicted it would arrive around the year 2300 AD. 

I'm not going to get there, but it will come, 200 years from now. By that point societies will have learned to go, as they write, "from ore" that is, concentrated ore, "to more common rocks." The Earth's crust, they pointed out, is loaded with dispersed but immense quantities of aluminum, iron, quantities that may be un-economic to mine today, but some day may come into use. In the age of substitutability energy is the ultimate raw material. If you have enough energy you can mine the ocean, you can mine the crust of the Earth. When the last chunk of coal and the last drop of oil are gone, scientists will come forward with new forms of energy. What they had in mind was particularly nuclear fusion, nuclear reactors. As Weinberg puts it elsewhere, "With an inexhaustible source of energy, man could free himself from material want, essentially forever." I think what their talking about, and it becomes even clearer when you read the works of Herman Kann who was writing on these same themes, very much along the same lines, about the same time. What they're talking about is basically what we are doing today, strip mining in West Virginia, mountaintop removal, fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania, deep-ocean drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The only practical issue for most critics of The Limits to Growth is whether there was any shortage of the basic atoms and molecules needed to keep the economy humming. There is forever a new world under our feet. 

Five years after The Limits to Growth was published the Harvard sociologist, Daniel Bell, announced that the MIT team had been thoroughly exposed as frauds. That's his phrase. The whole controversy, in his view, had been a prime example, "of the issue-attention cycle, and it's deleterious effects of public policy debate." You know, an issue today, an issue tomorrow. That issue had now become thoroughly exhausted. He went on to denounce the book as a misuse of science to push a particular point of view, and he chanted the familiar refrain, "Economic growth is desirable, possible and necessary." By the late 1970's the score seemed decisively against the limited Earth point of view. Growth team, 10, Limits team, 2. The election of anti-environmentalist Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in 1980, and the simultaneous shift to policy all over the world toward neo-conservative ideology, a shift that has lasted well into the 21st century, seemed to finalize the score, and send the losers home in defeat. Growth with as few impediments as possible became the dominant cry in policy circles. That growth idea appeared to have public opinion strongly behind it. In fact, the game was not yet over. 

It's not over now. While growth resumed its accustomed place at the head of world-policy agendas, the idea of limits was quietly, subtly moving forward in public acceptance and scientific support. Despite the repeated assurances that there was still plenty of resources to mine, the planet did not, in fact, seem to offer the wide-open horizons it once did. As two critics of the modern environmental movement lamented, "The idea of limits to growth still retains a hold on the public's imagination." They couldn't figure it out. How the score eventually became tied, and how the Limits team rallied and began to move ahead on the scoreboard, is a story that has not yet been told. When we're able to take a longer-time perspective, we may discover that it is the older, popular growth idea that is dying. We may be living through a revolution in consciousness. Historians of this era will need to look at two levels of thinking, popular and scientific. On the popular level, anecdotal evidence suggests that people may be closer than ever to accepting an idea of limits, more aware than ever of how crowded the Earth has become. The consequences of our swelling numbers have come home to people in the form of commuter gridlock, polluted waterways, and agricultural fields drenched with chemicals to produce enough food. 

This is the experience that increasingly we face on this Earth, trash we don't know what to do with, agriculture that is poisoning us just simply to raise enough food for ourselves. All over the world nations have come to see further population growth as a problem needing solutions. The Chinese accepted this decades ago. Although they may content themselves with hoping, this seems to be where we stand today, hoping that this is a problem that would solve itself. Another manifestation of public attitudes comes from the intense daily battles over land and water that is going on in every country, and certainly all over the United States. Where most people live, growth has become a contentious issue. The skeptical public has armed itself with impact statements, legal advice and grass-roots mobilizing techniques to confront developers, particularly when they are threatening to destroy wetlands, forests, prairies, even agricultural land on the urban fringe. It will take decades to assess the full extent to which the public has begun to acknowledge natural limits. Rushing into that vacuum, the pessimists claim, that nothing's happening. Nothing will ever happen! or if it happens, it will happen too late. 

In their 30 year update of The Limits to Growth, the MIT team fell into that pessimistic mood. "History," they assert, "suggests that society has limited capacity for responding to those limits with wise, far-sighted and altruistic measures." But is that so? Are there not, in fact, many examples where societies have learned to live within their limits? Far more than in the modern West. It's hard to deny that people's capacity to change or to be wise is always limited. Or to deny that powerful interests have often managed to stop changes. But in the past, that capacity was often large enough to bring about reforms and even revolutions. That may be so today. If it is, we will owe a lot to the natural science community. Building on the efforts of Jay Forrester and the Limits team, scientists have revealed more and more of the intricately balanced, highly vulnerable systems on which our lives depend, those systems that make the planet hospitable for life. The pioneers of natural systems science include: the British instrument maker, James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis: American biologist, Lynn Margulis; Dutch biogeochemist, Paul Crutzen; Canadian environmental scientist, Vaclav Smil; and the grandfather of them all, the Russian geochemist, Vladimir Vernadsky, inventor of the concept of the biosphere. Together they have described an Earth that is far more integrated and interlinked in its processes than we once realized. 

How do we keep intact the favorable environment we've know for the last 10 thousand years? Our knowledge of the Earth as a single, holistic system has, along with population, consumption, pollution, been increasing exponentially. The American space program has given us a photograph of the Earth from the moon which has stimulated people to try to understand the whole of the planet, and the fragile network of life it supports. Computers have given us the power to build sophisticated models that improve our understanding of functional inter-relations and system sensitivities. We have gathered large amounts of data on how far the human species has gone in altering the Earth, moving us dangerously close to system instabilities. The threat of abrupt, and possibly catastrophic, climate change is only one of many limits that we are now learning about. According to a research team lead by Johan Rockstrom of the Swedish Resilience Centre, this is from their article in Nature, published in 2009, "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," according to this article there are at least eight other critical thresholds that we need to be aware of and avoid crossing. Not just climate, but threshold of bio diversity, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, levels of stratospheric ozone, ocean acidification, global freshwater use, atmospheric aerosols and chemical pollutants.  So we are, it seems to me, coming up with new definitions of limits. Beyond natural resources, beyond that list of discrete commodities. Economists, like all of us, have been listening to these natural scientists and rethinking their views. 

One illustration of how a new generation on economists are revising the models in the light of the science of Earth systems comes from a book entitled, Scarcity and Growth in the New Millennium. It was published in 2005. The book questions one of the great classics in post-war natural resource economics, Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse's 1963 work, Scarcity and Growth. This earlier work concluded with a rosy picture of the consumer's future. Over the course of the last century, they concluded, prices had fallen steadily for all the raw materials needed in the modern economy. From the record of falling prices, they argued, it was clear that we are not running out of resources. But in 2005, the same organization that supported their work, Resources for the Future, published a set of papers suggesting that the old reasoning from a history of commodity prices is outmoded. Scarcity, the book argued, is quite real, but it is not scarcity as Barnett and Morse understood the term. We face a new scarcity, which the younger scholars define as the limitations on the Earth's capacity to absorb and to neutralize the unprecedented waste-streams of humanity. This phrase, new scarcity, may not be all together apt or helpful, or adequately express the problem of disturbing the Earth's systems, but it is evidence that many economists are no longer resisting the ideas of limits. 

We talking now, not simply about resource commodities, but about global tipping points. Accepting the idea of natural limits is of course not the same as accepting the idea of an end to economic growth. But that idea too has begun to find more and more advocates, so that even Robert Solow has admitted that a no-growth future is something he can contemplate. He ought to be able to do so. After all, it was the view of the founders of modern economics, particularly Adam Smith and most importantly, John Stuart Mill. As far back as 1848, Mill wrote, "The increase of wealth is not boundless. At the end of what (economists) call the progressive state lies the stationary state. All progress and wealth is but a postponement of this." In their concluding commentary in the book The Limits to Growth the executive committee of the Club of Rome wrote, "The concept of a society in a steady state of economic and ecological equilibrium may appear easy to grasp, although the reality is so distant from our experience as to require a Copernican revolution of the mind." In this phrase, Copernican revolution of the mind, they were suggesting a more radical change. It's an historical analogy worth thinking about. This comparison between our changing views of the Earth and the cosmos, and the changes that followed Copernicus appears more than once in recent writings. 

For example, in a 1999 paper published in Nature, H. J. Schellnhuber of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany argues in the same basic terms. The second Copernican revolution, he talks about, made possible by new technology. Just as Copernicus needed new technology to understand the cosmos in new ways, technology today is changing the ways in which we view the world. We are learning to see, for the first time, the Earth as a single, complex, dissipative, dynamic equilibrium, far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the Earth system. Just 50 years after Columbus's first voyage to the New World, Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus published his last and greatest work on the revolutions of the heavenly sphere. It has now been noted, I think, that Columbus and Copernicus were contemporaries. Both changed history, and the changes were related. Before Copernicus the Earth had been the fixed center of the finite universe, just as Europe considered itself the fixed center of human history. A hundred years later, astronomers had finally excepted that the Earth is only one of several planets in motion around the Sun, and that the universe is far more grand and infinite in its dimensions than anyone had realized. 

But demoting the Earth from the center of the universe did not mean scaling down Man's sense of possibility. Quite the contrary. Copernicus, like Columbus, destroyed the old sense of limits that had long constrained the human imagination. These two revolutions, in cosmology and geography, would bring fierce controversy in religion, philosophy, economics, race relations, and politics that would not end for centuries. Some of them haven't ended yet in parts of rural Kansas. We're still struggling with their implications. Can we say that another Copernican revolution may be in the making? A half century after Sputnik, 40 years after the publication of The Limits to Growth, the idea of a comprehensive Earth science does seem to be emerging, a science in which ecologists, geologists, climatologists, and others are contributing. Whether this awareness adds up to a revolutionary change in understanding we will not know for sure for some time to come. But such a revolution must be considered possible. Perhaps it is even inevitable. 

If that happens that the book The Limits to Growth will become one of the great harbingers of change, a step of courage and foresight away from a world devoted to unceasing economic growth, to one focused on finding a new equilibrium with the Earth. Thank you very much. [applause]