🔗 The Tipping Point Podcast: Problematique (Part 1)
Kicking off in Harvard in the late 1960s, Part 1 explores how young scientists found themselves thrust into one of the most controversial – but also prescient – scientific projects of all time.
That book was based on a pioneering MIT project that combined the most advanced computing power of the era with the very latest and best scientific research about humanity's impact on our environment. Using a new form of modelling called Systems Dynamics, a team of brilliant young scientists, led by Doctors Dennis and Donella (Dana) Meadows, built a model of the world and used it to create and test scenarios about humanity's future. They found that if we continued on our path of unfettered economic growth, we risked triggering a collapse in our modern civilization by the middle of the 21st century...
The Limits to Growth became a worldwide bestseller and is widely agreed to have kick-started the environmental movement. Yet it was attacked and demolished by mainstream scientists, business interests and, most notably, economists, who refused to acknowledge the possibility that humankind may not be able to seek undifferentiated growth in our economic activity, indefinitely
The first of a three part podcast about the 1970's book The Limits to Growth which is available for download in various formats.
Of course there's an excellent page about the book at Wikipedia with context, history and follow-up publications.
Via Dave Rogers who posted about this today with his own thoughts:
Chaos theory added another important dimension to systems thinking, and we now have at least some understanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems, but I think the idea remains foreign to the vast majority of people. It should be a literacy requirement in a technological civilization, but we're probably not going to have one for very much longer, so that problem will solve itself.