Beyond the Limits.

• Author: Kane, Hal

Twenty years ago, a book called The Limits to Growth produced shock waves among economic and business leaders by claiming, contrary to long-held assumptions, that industry could not go on growing forever. Written by three scientists and commissioned by the respected Club of Rome, the book argued that continued growth of population and consumption might outstrip the Earth's natural capacities, and that the resulting environmental decline posed a looming threat to the quality of life - and possibly even to life itself.

To avert this threat, said authors Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, societies had no choice but to slow their growth, consume less, have fewer children, and conserve the natural environment.

The Limits To Growth entered public awareness at the end of the most rapid phase of economic growth the world has ever experienced. World economic output quadrupled from $3 trillion shortly after World War II to almost $12 trillion in 1972. At least in the West, growth and consumption became guiding cultural principles. Up to that point, there had been little cause to question whether growth would go on indefinitely.

Since publication of that seminal book, public awareness of the issues it raised has exploded. People throughout the industrialized world have mobilized to recycle, conserve energy, reduce pollution, and take other actions to protect the health of the environment.

Yet, many measures of environmental health have not improved: industries continue to shirk environmental protections, more people measure self-worth by how much they own, and in the poorest regions, birthrates rage far higher than the prospects for decent livelihoods.

Other problems persist. The advocates of unrestrained growth have never moderated their opposition to messages of the sort found in The Limits to Growth. And, largely impervious to the debate about environmental constraints, governments have retained economic growth as the goal that eclipses all others.

It is against this backdrop that the authors who created such a stir two decades ago have issued an arresting sequel, Beyond the Limits. The new volume reinvigorates the argument, and in some respects raises the stakes. It does not make any major changes in the original thesis, but restates the original case persuasively - and with updated figures and information. What may be most significant is that 20 years of debate about nature's limits on economic growth, and 20 years more...