We could rein back on economic growth ourselves and embrace the promise of a steady state future in relative balance with the global biosphere, or we could ignore the limits to growth until we slammed into them, and topple over into a long ragged decline ending in a new dark age. The point of The Limits to Growth was that we as a species, and as a community of nations, had a choice. That’s one of the details that got swept under the rug by the mainstream back in the 1970s and still gets swept under the rug by the project’s critics today. It was not, as the corporate media insisted it was, a prophecy of doom. By that time, too, I had read enough to follow the logic of The Limits to Growth in detail. If I couldn’t find what I wanted there I could catch the Route 130 bus to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, not yet replaced by the monument to architectural incompetence that now squats on its site, and bring home a double armload of volumes on similar topics. The public library in Burien, Washington where I got most of my reading fodder then was well stocked with books on energy and the environment. In the 1970s you could talk about such things. Somehow I never managed to absorb the widespread American conviction that there will always be more so long as you whine for it loudly enough, and so the book became one of the volumes that shaped my youthful sense of where the future was headed. Its portrayal of a future of hard limits made immediate sense to me. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972-my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse-and several years passed before I found time to read it. I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print.
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