The Limits to Growth- is the prediction of 1972 going to happen?

A clip from the documentary "Earth Days (2009)" in which Dennis Meadows explains exponential growth, overshoot and collapse of society- from the 1972 study/book "The Limits to Growth"

Category:

Education

Tags:

• environment
• energy
• overpopulation
• crisis
• economy
• growth
• development
• science
• societal
• collapse
• peak
• oil
• malthusian
• catastrophe
• sustainability
• cornucopia

[azul93gt]

Paul Ehrlich (a butterfly specialist by trade) is a fraud. Here are some of his predictions.

•"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . [AND] hundreds of millions of people [including Americans] are going to starve to death." (1968)

•"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)

•"...England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)

[studioXforum]

@azul93gt

I guess you are commenting on a wrong video! : )

This video is NOT about Paul Ehrlich, but Dennis Meadows(and his team) and about their study/book "The Limits to Growth", as it says in the description...

[listen13]

Amazing! In just 40 short years of NGOs, grants and public-private partnerships, America has gone from a land where the individual reigned "king" to a plantation of collective control, ruled under communitarian law.

[listen13]

BTW today it's pretty much known as Agenda 21 accomplished through sustainable development, Smart Growth which as this video describes is NO growth except for the elitists who promote this crap. They'll eat strawberries while the majority of us will eat the Solent Green cookies that the rest of us became.

[piggykaiser]

40 years ago when many of us started talking about these problems we could not understand why no one was listening. Now I know. The corollary to Hugos famous quote is unfortunately: "If an idea's time has not come, it will have no affect".

[musicalidea]

@brandywells You're ignoring the thrust of my comment & bringing in irrelevant ad hominem info. to bolster your opposition to theories of ecological collapse via uncontrolled industrialization. My point is that all of the predictions you mentioned r sound in their reasoning & wrong in their timescale - I already admitted that in my first comment. The reason its important to redeem the reasoning is b/c these general phenomena WILL occur - even if a century or 2 after the prediction.

[brandywells]

@musicalidea Anyone could site examples of people that made predictions that were wrong. Afterall they're much more common. Part of making predictions is having a reasonable time scale. Ehrlich's predictions were quite specific and related to contemporary phenomenon (or so he thought). Why are you trying to reform this guy's tattered reputation? By all accounts he and wife are arrogant people that subscribe to the "lifeboat" theory. They would gladly sacrifice millions to save themselves.

[musicalidea]

@azul93gt Just because he was wrong abt the specifics does not discount the eventuality of his generalities. In 1700, I could have read Principia Mathematica & augered that man would walk on the moon by 1800, that by 1825 he would assuredly be able to speak instantaneously w/ any other man anywhere. Wrong with the dates, right with the forecast. Reason leads us to the same end w/ regard to all possible intersections of projected consumption, replenishment, pollution, birth & death rates.

[cazzo53]

Some of the information on this video is accurate but i don believe everything in it.. specially when the fellow said after he saw the Picture of the Earth from the moon, how can i believe everything after that B.S?? the fuck outta here!! but at the same time.. population wise. what's the point to have too many people in the planet for?? humans are simply reproducing faster than germs, but the bad news is that; most of those who are multiplying fast!! are useless to society....

[adrianfi7]

Nice bullshit oldtimer: Civilization can and most likely will collapse but it would be because of the stupidity and greed of the politicians just like ALL those times in the past.