Limits to Growth – What is the Club of Rome?
This is day two of our exponential growth demonstration. I hope you’re doing this at home or school or the office. We began two days ago with one grain of wheat. Yesterday we doubled the wheat, and here’s what we got…
Today let’s double that. Here’s a quick summary of Limits to Growth, courtesy of the Club of Rome. Be patient while it loads, and don’t click below on “Click to Play;” for some reason WordPress is not making life easy for me today.
So, what is this Club of Rome that commissioned the Limits to Growth study in 1970? It is actually a pretty amazing and forward-looking group of people. It sprang from an April, 1968 meeting of academics, industrialists, diplomats and other leading thinkers at a villa in Rome. They were invited by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish scientist Alexander King (King appears briefly in an historical clip in the GrowthBusters movie.) At the villa they discussed the predominance of short-term thinking in international affairs and concerns about increasing resource consumption in what was becoming a global economy.
The Club of Rome was catapulted onto the world stage with the release of its first study, officially titled the Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind. With the publication of the book based on this study, The Limits to Growth, the study came to be known by that name. The Club of Rome continues to operate, and has grown. Today it has over 1500 members and more than 30 national associations on five continents. Recently the Club co-sponsored with the Smithsonian a symposium marking the 40th anniversary of Limits to Growth.
The Club of Rome continues to work on what are undoubtedly the most critical issues of our time. I salute the organization and wish it success.
Dave Gardner
Filmmaker
Dave Gardner is the director of the new documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, which uncovers the cultural forces that keep us pursuing growth in the face of overwhelming evidence we’ve outgrown the planet.
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