The Limits to Growth

“This is such a depressing book. This is The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update. A lot of people, what they remember about The Limits to Growth is it was published in 1971 and was completely lambasted by economists, technologists, lots and lots of people. What it has sitting underneath it is a model of the world, a model of the world economy, which links population, food, industrial production, pollution, a few other things, it’s quite a complicated systems-dynamics model. Obviously it’s only a model, it’s a picture of the world, it isn’t the world itself. But what it said was that if our behaviour as a society didn’t change, we would end up with industrial collapse in the mid-2020s and a population collapse in the mid-2030s.” Read more...

The best books on Futures

Andrew Curry, Technologist

“The book was written 30 years ago. I read it in the 1980s and it made a big impact on me. The predictions were pretty accurate. They foresaw the strains of growth, and the wear on our planet is certainly starting to show. So it’s a good book, an easy read and it gives you some idea of what we’re up against. We must clean up our environment and find cleaner sources of energy.” Read more...

The best books on Clean Energy

Jerry McNerney, Politician

“This is a report produced in 1972, but it’s still as current now as it was then and is still available today. It was commissioned by the Club of Rome and produced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they did was simply to look at projections for world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion and draw up models of what would happen to the earth in those areas.” Read more...

The best books on Saving the World

Jonathon Porritt, Environmentalist

“Books like this predicted that there would be famines in the future due to the rising population.” Read more...

The best books on Global Warming

Rosamund McDougall, Environmentalist