The Great Disruption (3 page)

The work was so effectively vilified that it has become accepted wisdom that the book got it wrong. In fact, the book got it close to exactly right.

The most famous and effective attacks centered on one scenario from World3 where nonrenewable resources are depleted without any societal or market response. This was a clearly unrealistic scenario, as explained in the book, but in modeling it is useful to create extreme scenarios for comparison purposes. World3 was in fact used to generate a range of scenarios, many of which—including the “business as usual” scenario—saw collapse by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Despite the lack of rigor in the attacks, they soon became accepted, and for many even today
The Limits to Growth
simply got it wrong and is lumped in the same category as the earlier Malthusian forecasts of a global famine. Denial is a powerful thing.

In fact,
The Limits to Growth
has proven to be surprisingly accurate, not just conceptually as we'll explore over coming chapters, but numerically as well. In 2008, a study was done into the modeling by Graham Turner from Australia's national science body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, in a paper entitled “A Comparison of ‘The Limits to Growth' with Thirty Years of Reality.”
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It examined the past thirty years of actual results against the suite of scenarios in the
Limits to Growth
report and found that changes in industrial production, food production, and pollution up to 2000 compare well with the report's business-as-usual scenario—called the “World3 standard run.” Interestingly, this scenario includes economic and societal collapse around the middle of the twenty-first century!

Of course, it was never the point of
Limits
to precisely forecast the future for one hundred years, a clearly impossible task. The objective was actually far simpler—namely, to establish the obvious and commonsense conclusion that if you insist on growing your footprint exponentially within finite limits, this will unavoidably lead to a crash, unless you decide to stop the growth before it is too late.

The fact that the book's forecasts are broadly on track is a remarkable outcome and a testament to the author's technical competence and system insights.

This work clearly indicated that what we were facing was not just an energy crisis, or a population problem, or a climate crisis. Rather, it was a system design problem, with “the system” being our model of consumption-based, quantitative economic growth. This meant a system design change would be needed to solve it. The work sold many millions of copies and along with
Silent Spring
was one of the defining environmental treatises of all time.

The book also triggered widespread media coverage of these issues. I clearly remember as a thirteen year old in 1972, sitting in the morning sunshine on the back veranda of the family home in Australia and being captivated as I read a newspaper series about the future of humanity. It painted a bleak picture of global crises around shortages of resources and food and forecast a society creaking under the burdens of population growth and pollution.

I recognized this was my future and that, if it unfolded as predicted, this would be a very bleak future indeed. Little did I know how deeply these ideas had entered my young mind. This was probably the moment my life's direction was set.

Some thirty years later I became good friends with one of the authors, Professor Jorgen Randers, when we both joined the faculty of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and taught together on the Prince of Wales's Business and the Environment Program.

When I discussed with Jorgen recently why and how he became a lifelong environmentalist, he explained that he joined the team that produced World3 and wrote the
Limits to Growth
report while completing his PhD at MIT. He did so out of intellectual curiosity about system dynamics rather than out of any initial interest in environmental issues. It was only when their analysis showed the consequences of exponential growth that his life changed track. He then became focused on advocacy to prevent what he learned from their modeling was the otherwise inevitable crash of the global economy and society, through pollution and resource depletion.

Nearly forty years later, Jorgen still maintains his passionate advocacy of the need for change, cheerfully lecturing around the world in his thick Norwegian accent and indulging his passion for visiting areas of great biodiversity that he believes will soon be largely gone.

Despite the lack of real action, from 1972 on the environmental movement built strongly. Greenpeace was founded, along with many other environmental organizations, and around the world people engaged in these issues at a broad and deep level. Greenpeace's arrival was important both practically and symbolically. It symbolized the arrival into the mainstream of global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—nonaligned agencies that provide a global check and balance to the behavior of governments and multinational corporations. Greenpeace also provided a practical accountability and monitoring capacity with courageous and daring confrontations, bringing environmentally destructive behavior into the living rooms of ordinary people through its powerful use of the global media.

In the face of growing public concern that was mobilized largely by these groups, strong action by regulators like the various national EPAs and their equivalents during the 1970s saw significant steps taken to address city air quality, water pollution, and other such impacts. As a result, there was considerable improvement in many Western countries, and many incorrectly saw this as the problems being addressed. Certainly it was good that rivers stopped bursting into flame, but the problems ran much deeper.

Around this time I became an activist, at the age of fifteen, focusing on issues surrounding human rights and various independence struggles, such as that in East Timor. In the mid-1970s, I became very involved in antiapartheid campaigns. I had been heavily influenced in my thinking by the massacre in Soweto, South Africa, where children even younger than me were shot and killed when protesting against not being taught in their own language. The concept of sacrificing your life for your beliefs had a deep influence on my understanding of what it meant to be an activist and how lucky I was to live in Australia.

This led to my first involvement in direct action protests, chaining myself to the gates of the South African embassy in Canberra, Australia, at the age of seventeen. I remember being a very nervous young person taking action that could lead to my being arrested. However, I was acutely aware that with the people I was supporting in South Africa being shot for their beliefs, the risks to me paled by comparison. It was an exciting time for a young seventeen-year-old, being interviewed on national radio and TV about the outrageous abuses of human rights in South Africa while I stood there chained to the gates of the embassy's main entrance. I believed I was making a difference, and it felt good.

I also remember very clearly, though rather embarrassingly, a day in 1977 when the International Whaling Commission was meeting in Canberra. On our way from an antiapartheid protest, we drove past a much larger protest against whaling by Greenpeace and others. The conversation in the car was one of moral outrage that so many people cared about whales more than they cared about people. “Why aren't they joining our protest, which is about people being oppressed and killed?” we asked. “Who cares about whales when people are dying?”

Looking back, I can see that, like most people at that time, I failed to understand Carson's argument about the interconnectedness of life and the arrogance of humanity. I saw people as superior and more important beings, from which whales were a separate and an unrelated distraction; I failed to see that protecting ocean life was about protecting the complex system that supported us. I didn't yet understand that with the whales went the watchers.

I probably should have spent more time reading Henry Thoreau and less time reading Chairman Mao!

My personal head space took a profound shift in 1979 with the birth of my first child, Callan. Even though I was just twenty years old at the time, my span of interest suddenly catapulted way into the future. Many first-time parents say this happens. You realize that along with newfound responsibility is a newfound understanding of the implications of life being handed down to future generations, not just in theory but with
your
genes being passed on to experience whatever the future holds. Once you cross that line, the future becomes a lot more personal, and so it did for me when Callan was born.

So there was a lot going on in the 1970s. Despite these efforts, the 1980s was characterized mainly by environmental disasters, including some with global impact.

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released tons of toxic gases into the local atmosphere in the world's worst industrial disaster. Thousands were killed immediately, from the gases or in the panicked stampede to escape. Best estimates suggest that over fifteen thousand people ultimately lost their lives.
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In many ways, the disaster was emblematic of the 1980s. As developed countries raised their own standards, industry in developing countries continued to implement lower standards—to make products for rich countries. Accidents like that in Bhopal put this issue of Western companies' behavior in the developing world firmly on the agenda.

On April 26, 1986, the irrelevance of borders to environmental pollution was catapulted into public consciousness. At 1:23 a.m. that day, two explosions occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. A power surge had ruptured the uranium fuel rods, while a steam explosion created a huge fireball, causing the reactor's dome-shaped roof to be blown off and the contents to erupt outward. Air was sucked into the shattered reactor, igniting flammable carbon monoxide gas that caused a reactor fire that burned for nine days.

The resulting radioactive plume blanketed the nearby city of Pripyat. The cloud moved on to the north and west, contaminating land in neighboring Belarus, then drifted across Eastern Europe and over Scandinavia. While monitoring stations in Scandinavia began reporting abnormally high levels of radioactivity, there was silence from the Soviet authorities. They took three days to acknowledge there had even been an accident.

Many parts of Europe were dramatically affected by radiation poisoning drifting across the continent. Swedish food authorities recommended that moose hunters eat moose or fish no more than once a month owing to significant levels of radioactive contamination. Mushrooms, berries, and honey from the north of Sweden—where the weather had carried the radiation—could not be sold. In the years following, hundreds of thousands of culled reindeers were rejected in testing due to radiation contamination. Reindeer herding and the sale of reindeer meat largely sustains the indigenous Saami population of northern Scandinavia. The stories of this incident are still told and resonate in Sweden to this day. As well as locking in public skeptism of the safety of nuclear power, people had been given a palpable example of global interconnectedness.

The 1980s also brought one of the world's most famous oil spills by the world's least favorite oil company, when the
Exxon Valdez
spilled 250,000 barrels of oil into the pristine waters of Alaska in 1989. A legal battle followed to hold Exxon accountable for the damage—they had placed in charge of the tanker a known alcoholic, who was drunk and not on the bridge at the time the vessel ran aground. At the initial trial, a jury levied $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon. With their enormous resources and so much money at stake, Exxon managed to drag the legal process on for decades, until in 2008 the Supreme Court cut punitive damages to just $507 million. That same year, Exxon filed a record profit of over $40 billion.

With the
Valdez
incident and the corporation's strident opposition to action on climate change, including actively financing antiscience climate skeptism to this day, ExxonMobil has earned the well-deserved nickname of the Death Star among many environmentalists.
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There was one significant positive development in the 1980s when the world adopted a key global environmental agreement to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were creating a hole in the ozone layer. This agreement in 1987, supported by the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, remains the classic example of denial and delay by industry being followed by decisive global action once denial ends. UN chief Kofi Annan described this agreement as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and it remains a shining example of how action can be taken when business and governments decide to do so.

Some years later, as an adviser to the DuPont Company, I heard the inside view on this shift from the executives there. When DuPont's own scientists came to the conclusion that CFCs were definitely the cause of ozone depletion, the company faced an ugly reality that a whole area of their business was effectively finished. DuPont, despite being accurately targeted by Greenpeace at one stage as the “World's Biggest Polluter,” has a strong ethical culture. When their scientists agreed with the problem, DuPont agreed to close down that business and cease production, well ahead of what the agreement required. This was a tough decision, as it was not yet then clear to DuPont whether they could participate in the market for alternative products.

The executives I spoke to were proud of this decisive ethical action by their company. Mind you, at the time the decision wasn't just about ethics, with DuPont correctly seeing this as a serious business issue. As DuPont's Joseph Glas said, “When you have $3 billion of CFCs sold worldwide and 70 percent of that is about to be regulated out of existence, there is a tremendous market potential.”