> the book that featured this world model was a bestseller in the 70s

Was "the book" she mentions the now debunked book "The Population Bomb"? The 70s had lots of catesrophic thinking because they had an economic crisis. Overpopulation concerns have been around for literally centuries, and crop up regularly from time to time. Thomas Malthus talked about it in the 1800s too, while at the same time not realizing that farming methods and enclosure acts were massively increasing the amount of food that could be produced - even tho he could literally see it happening from his doorstep.

The article does a particularly bad job at summarising the premise of the paper. It doesn't say a single thing about why the paper thinks growth will reverse rather than simply slow (as one would expect if the premises of nearing limitations were true). It makes me wonder if the author even bothered to read the report. It is long, and who has time for that? (Hint, maybe someone who's getting paid to write about it could find the time).

Here's a link to the actual report btw: https://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Gr...

It seems silly to me to sing the praises of a model that basically extrapolates historical data. Have trends continued? Yes. Was that surprising? Nobody has been surprised by this.

The report claims that:

"Technological solutions... may have some short term effect in relieving pressures caused by growth, but in the long run they do nothing to prevent the overshoot and subsequent collapse of the system."

This statement is either wrong or meaningless. If its saying that technology successfully allows us to grow further for longer, but that we will inevitably overshoot what is sustainable and have to scale back - I'd agree but it seems kind of obvious. If instead its saying that technology has simply disguised the problems and will not delay "collapse of the system" - I think they have been proven wrong in every century in the past 1000 years. Technology absolutely helps make growth more sustainable.

The report seems to claim that growth at the rates that existed back when it was written is unsustainable because of the interactions of complex positive and negative feedback loops. I couldn't find anywhere in the report that actually made that clear, but by skimming a few sections, thats what it seems like.

I think its very clear that there are limits on various things humans do - or rather, consequences that become significant after enough relevant activity. Atmosopheric pollution is one of those things. We're certainly polluting the air too much, among other things. These have both ecological and health effects that are obviously negative. However, the paper also talks about "famine" and water availability. However, by pretty much any metric, there is a lower incidence of all kinds of hunger or thirst in the world. Things have gotten better and better every decade for centuries by most metrics. It talks about peak oil - well we've been talking about that one for a while. One day it will come, but its seeming more and more likely it will peak incredibly slowly rather than be a sudden crisis like the gas lines in the 70s.

The economic problems we're seeing today are not caused by resource limits, but rather by government corruption in the vast majority of governments around the world that has lead to extracting money from the poor and giving to the rich. Generally bankers. Yes, we have a pollution problem, but we do not have a population problem. In fact, its projected that world population will peak in the 2060s. We do not have a phsical resource problem. The primary problems we have as a society is pollution, deforestation, and soil depletion. Those are the only sustainability problems I can think of (other than economic problems).