Environmental Health, Planetary Boundaries and Limits to Growth

The Limits to Growth (1972) was commissioned by the Club of Rome and written by a research team led by Donella Meadows, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was not the first work to grapple with the idea that physical limits apply to the human economic and social system, but it drew extensive attention and remains the best-selling environmental book of all time. The book summarized outcomes of modeling work that explored the complex interactions between human civilization and the physical world in which it is inextricably embedded. The MIT team concluded that significant systemic problems were emerging from accelerating industrialization, population growth, under-nutrition, the depletion of non-renewable resources and environmental contamination and decline.