Global Systems Thinking is an optional module for the Food Studies MA at Exeter, but the more I follow it, the more relevant it feels. I wanted a solid underpinning in systems thinking, having been interested in it for some time, but not being able to properly articulate what it was about, or really understand the dynamics. It’s still early days in the course, but I’m particularly glad I chose this module. Even this week, there is news coverage of Earth’s “vital signs” having hit record extremes, indicating that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance”. This week’s lecture on limits to growth couldn’t have been more timely, dealing with reinforcing feedback loops and ecological overshoot of the kind described in the Guardian story.
This week’s lecture centred around the book Limits to Growth, published in 1972, a report for the Club of Rome. The core idea of the report is that collapse is coming, unless we do something differently. So what are the potential ways to avoid worst case scenarios?
James Dyke, lecturing, mentioned the Dark Mountain Project and Deep Adaptation. They ask what civilization looks like without what we consider to be civilization (technology, finance)? The Dark Mountain project refers to the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that it says is now underway. Deep Adaptation offers itself as a guide to navigating a world riven by climate chaos.
I’m not familiar with them, but they remind me of Bill McGuire’s book Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, which I have read. In Hothouse Earth, McGuire warns of the catastrophic impacts of climate change, arguing that we have already passed critical tipping points and face a future of extreme weather, rising sea levels, and societal upheaval, unless urgent action is taken to mitigate its effects. The book suggests that it is no longer about returning to any comfortable point in the past, rather that we are all going to experience increasing discomfort in the future, and the best we can hope for is to prevent the very worst effects of climate breakdown and adapt to that discomfort.
Then we have the likes of the Breakthrough Institute, who think that we’ll overcome the challenges before us through innovation. There’s nothing that we can’t do.
The diagnosis of the challenges that we have is the same, but these different schools of thought diverge on what we do next.
James then touched on transhumanism, the idea that humanity is on the cusp of our next stage in evolution, that we can overcome biological limitations like ageing, disease, and even death, augmented by technology. Insane, of course, but popular amongst some of our tech bro overlords, people with seemingly unlimited resources as well as, increasingly, political clout. Transhumanism throws up the question of why we bother worrying about millions starving now, why we bother tackling climate change or biodiversity loss, when it means nothing if you want to colonise Mars and seed the universe with an unlimited number of technologically augmented beings. Why bother fixing the Earth if you’re going to colonise Mars? Oh, and: we will never colonise Mars.
It made me think of Interstellar. “We’re not meant to save the world,” says Michael Caine’s Professor Brand, one of Earth’s last astrophysicists. “we’re meant to leave it”.
But never mind transhumanism and colonising Mars. Right now, tech bros would rather we go all-in with AI as if it is supposed to solve all our problems when it gets clever enough, rather than doing the boring work of ecosystem restoration and food systems change.
Back to Limits to Growth, then, which predates Dark Mountain and Deep Adaptation and is contemporaneous with neo-Malthusianism expressed in works like Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. This connects back to the David Lam essay we read following week two, How the World Survived the Population Bomb.
This graph was a wake-up call. Look at the growth in use of natural gas, oil and coal, and now think how we achieve Net Zero by 2050.
Post-war we had the Great Acceleration, increased use of fossil fuels, industrialisation and globalisation. At its simplest level, it’s an exponential function. Additional sources of fuel such as biofuels and renewables aren’t replacing fossil fuels. They’re being added on top. In some places, mainly cities, there has been an energy shift, but globally, it’s a story of addition.
Now we look at the climate crisis and how all of our coal, oil and gas use needs to get to zero. Look at the arc of human history, and we have been reliant for most of it on muscle and firewood. In the last 300 years, a massive increase in energy consumption off the back of fossil fuels. We’re back to the point that an exponential function can’t carry on indefinitely without collapse. So what’s next? This is where The Limits to Growth comes in. With consumption going up, what future prospects are we looking at? The choices appear to be a soft landing or a hard correction (a collapse).
The Limits to Growth report, written for the club of Rome and published in 1972, used a system dynamics model called World3 to run a series of what if scenarios simulating interactions between population, industrial growth, food production, and environmental resources on a global scale. The model aimed to capture how civilization works, then make predictions.
The ‘standard run’ predicted that by the mid 21st century, food production would collapse along with industrial output, goods and services as resources became depleted and the environment degraded. This is almost exactly the scenario that scientists are warning about in that Guardian article.
This doesn’t mean doom is inevitable. A ‘stabilised scenario’ predicted a levelling-off of death and birth rates and a slower drop in resource availability, rather than a crash. This is the soft landing, a transition from exponential growth to a more stable state. But reaching this stabilised scenario wasn’t straightforward. Increasing rates of innovation only deferred the collapse, which was greater – the antithesis of the thinking of the likes of the Breakthrough Institute.
The only way to achieve stability and avoid a collapse was to take energy out of the system by reducing the growth rate. This would mean slowing down economic growth through macroeconomic policy. And this went down badly with economists at the time, and still does.
Concerns around diminishing resource availability in the 1970s were based partly on peak oil, the idea that oil production had reached a plateau and would then drop; enhanced oil recovery has, however, seen an increase in extraction since the turn of the century, so once more, innovation has delayed collapse. Necessity is the mother of invention, as Ester Boserup would say, so we don’t walk away from depleted resources, we innovate. There may still be a cliff edge, but as long as we can innovate, we can continue to push that further away.
The question then ultimately may become, is there a limit to innovation? Is the limit to human development constrained not by resources, but by human creativity and capability?
While I believe in the human capacity to innovate, I don’t believe that there will be a panacea. I think that what is coming in the future is going to be extremely unpleasant for a lot of people, deadly for more, and that greed and the old power structures will ensure that the disproportionate burden is placed on those least able to shoulder it. Evidence: watch the news. It’s happening. And yet, we don’t know exactly what the future will bring. David Lam’s analysis of how we survived the population bomb offers hope that maybe we can find a way to innovate our way out of the worst effects of the current crises of resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity collapse and climate breakdown.
Perhaps all our innovations are merely postponing inevitable collapse, making it even worse when it finally arrives. But it feels more like we might be trapped in a cycle where brief respites from catastrophe are only followed by steadily worsening conditions. As Jorgen Randers, co-author of Limits to Growth, remarked six years ago at the Club of Rome’s 50th anniversary summit, “The phrase ‘global collapse’ ended up being associated with Limits to Growth. It shouldn’t. The world will not collapse, as I see it and as my colleagues see it, from physical limitations. What will happen is that we will get an increasingly unpleasant world of social decline.”
Instead of creating genuine systemic change by slowing down, shifting focus from growth to ecological restoration, social good and health, and preventing that decline, it seems humanity may be doomed to repeat this cycle of looming collapse and innovation. As Disney’s Peter Pan puts it, “all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.”
I needed to stop taking notes at this point because I have to get on with prep work on another module, but I did at least get an answer to the whole A / B / see-saw question. The example in last week’s lecture was a bit abstract for my tiny brain, but essentially if industrial activity (A) increases, then energy reserves (B) decrease, and if industrial activity (B) decreases, then energy reserves (A) increase. However, if energy reserves (B) increase, industrial activity (A) increases and if energy reserves (B) decrease, industrial activity (A) decreases. So that’s clear.