Half a century ago, a small group of esteemed thinkers calling themselves the Club of Rome got together to chew on a thorny question: What would happen if humanity continued to consume the world’s finite resources as if they were unlimited? Their efforts led to the now-famous 1972 newspaper “The Limits to Growth”, in which they modeled what might lie in wait for humanity.
It was not a pretty picture. The world, they predicted, was on track to exceed its capacity to sustain sustained growth at some point in the first half of this century. Continuing business as usual – burning resources while polluting the environment and pumping out carbon – would result in a “sudden and uncontrollable decline” in food production, population and industrial output by the end of the 21st century. Or simply put, global collapse.
Fast forward 50 years, and humanity is still in deep trouble. In 2020, econometrician Gaya Herrington revised and updated the Club of Rome models to see if we have deviated from this terrible path and found that we have barely moved the needle. But while we are still on this difficult path, all hope is not lost. WIRED spoke to Herrington to find out what she thinks might happen, how humanity can secure its future, and how we have a chance to step up and not only survive, but thrive.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: How would you describe humanity’s current chances of avoiding global collapse?
Gaya Herrington: Very succinctly, we’re in a now-or-never moment. What we do in the next five to ten years will determine humanity’s levels of prosperity for the rest of the century. There are so many tipping points coming up, in terms of climatein terms of biodiversity. So: change our current paradigm, otherwise our prosperity will decline.
You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We don’t have the ability to keep growing forever. It’s that simple.
When you reviewed the work of the Club of Rome, you found that we haven’t changed course in the last 50 years. If we continue as we are, what’s next?
Everything is connected. We are very interdependent, so our economy is 100 percent embedded in society and our society is 100 percent embedded in nature. In a system, when it starts to break down, you can see it start to flicker. So you have social crises, crises in governance — rising populism and political violence, falling confidence– and of course we now have the environmental crises – the floods and the droughts.
Those are warning signs, because the system is always trying to balance itself, to maintain itself. But you don’t want to get to the tipping point. You want to listen for the flickering.
Ignore them, and overall the world would be much less stable and pleasant, as things like clean air, clean water, and nutritious food will be harder to come by. It is difficult to predict accurately for any location as we have never experienced this situation before, but parts of the world would become uninhabitable and we would experience more intense and frequent weather disasters and crop failures. Mass migrations would most likely increase in size and frequency.