Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

Front matter

Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

What a 50-Year-Old Model of the World Taught Me About a Way Forward for Us Today

Dedication

To environmental and social activists around the world. 1 have been thanked for my courage and persistence in my work on The Limits to Growth. I am grateful for these praises, but I do not deserve them. Although research and writing are excruciating and always thrice the amount of effort I thought they would be, doing so never made me feel unsafe. Environmental and human rights activists make enormous sacrifices protecting those with little or no voice. Each week, an average of four activists pay for this with their life, a third of which are indigenous people. The number of murders has been increasing for almost two decades. This is a humble salute to the bravery of all these environmental and social defenders. You are the unsung heroes of our time.

Gaya Herrington

Foreword

It is my pleasure to congratulate Gaya Herrington on her excellent research. Since last year, Gaya's work has often been characterized in the media as a validation of The Limits to Growth. More than anything, I personally find her research a testimony of what happens when scientists let their curiosity guide their work. In this situation, many find meaning in servitude to the world, like when my friends and I wrote The Limits to Growth.

Over the past five decades, I have witnessed the waves of debate that The Limits to Growth has stirred. The voices of support and the choirs of criticism. Gaya has brought some order to this debate by doing the only thing that is scientifically rigorous when one wants to assess the scenarios in The Limits to Growth books for their validity, and most importantly, for their usefulness in informing us about possible actual developments over the ensuing decades. She did her research on The Limits to Growth, so as to understand the modeling technique and to be able to interpret its outputs and then compared the scenarios against real-world data.

After Gaya’s research was published, she continued to follow her curiosity and delved deeper into what her conclusions mean for our common quest for higher global well-being. Because, as Gaya highlights in her work, the fact that there has not yet been a global collapse due to environmental reasons does not mean that the future is rosy. We are starting to see a stagnation in human well-being. My expectation is that this stagnation will turn into a decline unless there is truly extraordinary collective action to break from business as usual, as well as decision making as usual.

My intense wish is that Gaya’s study is used to accelerate what needs to be done: bring down the human footprint, notably by reducing the climate footprint in the world of the rich, where the minority of the 1.5 billion people out of the 8 billion global population cause the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions. This reduction in our footprint, although unachievable without the rich nations sharply reducing their material consumption, does not need to be a reduction in our well-being. As Gaya beautifully describes in this book, it is in fact an opportunity for humanity to achieve greater well-being, in a way that can last. To let go of an unsatisfying and ultimately doomed pursuit of continuous growth at all costs and find true purpose in helping people and all other parts of nature thrive. We’ll want to listen to her message.

Jorgen Randers Professor Emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School and co-author of The Limits to Growth

Praise for Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

This book by a young courageous thinker is a call to action to her peers to shift from the competitive, conflict-ridden, and unsustainable overconsumption culture, towards collaborative mutually enriching relational culture that aligns to what it means to be human. The future of our planet depends on the ability of each of us to embrace our interdependence on one another within the web of life within which we are inextricably linked. This book is a must-read for all those searching for how to promote a future we can be proud to bequeath to our Children's Children.

Mamphela Ramphele Ph.D. Co-President of the Club of Rome

This clear-eyed, scientifically based yet extremely readable book is essential reading. Read it to learn in careful and systematic detail why the relentless pursuit of growth of monetary incomes, without considering its patterns and ignoring its inequalities, is leading humanity headlong into disaster. But read it also for hope: to learn that changing course is possible. There are feasible ways to fulfill human needs equitably, with respect for nature and the planet, which would save the planet, transform societies, and enrich all of us.

Jayati Ghosh Ph.D. Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and member of the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Board of Effective Multilateralism

Researchers over the last 50 years have put tremendous effort into finding excuses for not taking planetary constraints seriously. Gaya Herrington discusses their common misconceptions, but also provides guidance on how to wrestle with the reality of living on a materially constrained planned. She shows that there is only upside in embracing this reality: it helps you navigate future rapids more effectively. Study Gaya's contribution because it may rescue you from the planetary blindness your professional education most likely fed you, or at least condoned.

Mathis Wackernagel Ph.D. Founder and President of the Global Footprint Network

Gaya Herrington's research shows in hard numbers what many have felt intuitively: that we are experiencing a hinge point in human history, and the hour is late to take action. With a call for humanity to embrace responsibility, Gaya is asking for much. But she is leading by example.

Hunter Lovins

J.D. President of Natural Capitalism Solutions

This book is for anyone longing to understand how the personal connects with the big-picture systems that have brought us to this perilous point in our human story. In a voice that is engaging, honest, and often moving, Gaya Herrington weaves together science with insights and anecdotes that bring her potent conclusions to life. She describes what is at stake, but also what we stand to gain by going beyond growth and transforming antiquated systems: a world we want to live in.

Julia Kim

Ph.D. Program Director, Gross National Happiness Centre Bhutan