Believing Cassandra

How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist's World

Alan AtKisson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849711722
• eBook ISBN: 9781136540615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

A bestseller on Amazon.com within months of its first release, Alan AtKisson's debut book quickly became a modern classic of sustainability literature. Global companies, grassroots groups, university courses, government agencies, and even the US Army ordered it by the box. Now fully revised and updated, Believing Cassandra: How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist's World is even more relevant, fresh, and motivating than when it first appeared in 1999.

In a style that's refreshingly candid and vivid, with unforgettable personal anecdotes, AtKisson provides us with a bridge over the sea of despair, and shows us how to catch the wave to an enticing, sustainable future. He empowers the reader to join the pioneers who created the ideas, techniques and practices of sustainable living - the people who prove Cassandra's warnings wrong, by believing in them, and taking strategic action.

Part 1

Cassandra’s Dilemma

1

When Worlds Collapse

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.

– Hunter S. Thompson

At the vulnerable age of 19, I read a small paperback book called The Limits to Growth. No other book would influence my life so greatly, though I could barely understand its message at the time. Had I been able to comprehend it thoroughly, I might have laid down my head in the library and wept. At the same time, if I had been granted a vision of where my interest in the book and its central message would ultimately take me, I would have been overcome with amazement.

The Limits to Growth deserves a place on the list of the most controversial books of the 20th century, right up there with James Joyce’s Ulysses, Madonna’s Sex and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Its publication in 1972 ignited a firestorm of international discussion and debate.¹ The book’s authors – Donella (‘Dana’) Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William H. Behrens III, with Dana as the principal writer – were part of a young team of scientists (average age 26) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had spent two years programming a computer to act as a model of the entire world. The future of that simulated world – they called it ‘World3’ because it was the third in a series of attempts to create a global computer model – did not look good. In scenario after scenario, when humanity’s wildly accelerating growth in population, resource use and pollution was left unchecked, World3 collapsed. No simulated improvements in technology could prevent simulated catastrophe. Humanity’s swelling billions would consistently overshoot Planet Earth’s capacity to feed, support and employ them. Then they would start dying off, as their agriculture began to fail and their industrial production crashed. Without decisive action to bring growth under control, and quickly, collapse always came within 100 simulated years.

That word ‘collapse’ gives the impression of suddenness and finality, but these researchers were predicting neither a sudden nor final apocalypse. In fact, they were not predicting anything at all. They were simply analysing the existing trends, programming the computer to project the way these trends (in areas like population growth, industrial waste and food supply) would interact in the future, and reporting on what would happen if humanity did not change course. The statistical collapse that consistently occurred was more like a swift slide than a mad plummet, more swan-dive than cannonball. The little line on the graph representing human population would keep rocketing up until it reached the stratospheric level of 12 or 15 billion people, then it would turn over and start heading down to ground zero just as rapidly. The same thing happened to the lines for food production and industrial output. There was an odd gracefulness to the shape of the curves coming out of the computer, an eerie mathematical beauty that masked the horror of their meaning.

It is mercifully difficult to imagine living through a global collapse of the kind portrayed by World3’s symbolic line graphs. Over the course of a generation, some combination of horrific disasters – famine, disease, widespread slow-motion poisoning caused by pollution, vicious wars fought over dwindling resources by unemployed and desperate young men, and, last but not least, astonishing natural disasters fuelled by climate change – would combine to kill off quite a few billion people. Nothing remotely like this has ever happened to humanity on the global scale. The closest examples might be the Black Death plague in medieval Europe, or the mind-numbing carnage of the 20th century’s world wars, but even these were limited in scope, mere circus sideshows by comparison.

And that’s just the fate of humanity. Although World3 did not overly concern itself with the ultimate effects on Nature and its web of complex ecosystems, one can easily discern, reading between the lines on the old printouts, the eventual collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems as well. A world full of desperate and impoverished people is a world emptied of swordfish, rainforests and panda bears. A collapse, if it occurred, would take so many species with it that Nature would have to spend 5 to 10 million years rebuilding its storehouse of diversity.

And yet, life would go on. There would still be humans and other species, albeit far fewer of both. ‘Collapse’ does not mean the end of the world, the end of Nature or the end of anything, really, except perhaps the comforts of industrial civilization, together with thousands of species, billions of people’s lives and humanity’s collective innocence about three fundamental laws of Nature. First, when it comes to population growth (for any species, not just humans), what goes up exponentially must stabilize, or it will crash down. Second, with regard to forests, fish and other resources, what gets used too rapidly and too thoughtlessly will ultimately cease to exist. And finally, as for waste and pollution, what gets dumped – into the water, land or air – spreads out, hangs around and creates havoc for generations to come.

None of these are desirable outcomes for the human project known as civilization. Yet these are the terrors consistently produced by World3, given certain assumptions about where the real world had been and where it was currently headed.

World3, its creators knew, was flawed. There were certain to be gaps of knowledge, errors of calculation, problems of interpretation. Estimates made to fill holes in the data were probably inaccurate. But since the whole point was to imitate, as closely as possible, the likely behaviour of the real world, the consistent pattern of the model’s results – rapid growth to the point of overshoot, followed by collapse – was rather disturbing. It almost didn’t matter whether the inevitable estimates were optimistic or pessimistic: collapse was the perennial outcome. Prodded by their funders, the World3 creators began to feel they had an important message to deliver. Aided by a generous promotional budget and savvy media work, the image of a computer pronouncing on humanity’s fate made big headlines. Unfortunately, the message was garbled in the transmission.

The authors of The Limits to Growth did not think of themselves as prophets. They were just hotshot academics playing with a new toy in a new field: computer-based models of dynamic systems. They had plenty of backing from a prominent internationalist forum known as the Club of Rome and from the Volkswagen Foundation. They were protégés of Jay Forrester, the brilliant founder of their new science, and they had done their mentor proud by taking his breakthrough ideas about stocks and flows, feedbacks and delays, and creating the most ambitious mathematical copy of the world that anyone had ever seen.

To accomplish this, they built smaller models of subsystems of the world – population, agriculture, resources, industrial production and pollution – and then linked them together. The object was to see how various trends affected each other: how rising pollution levels, say, might eventually speed up death rates, and how that in turn might affect the food supply. World3 was an attempt to mimic, using differential equations and feedback loops, the famous dictum of John Muir that ‘everything is hitched to everything else in the universe’.

The real world – let’s call it the World – is far more complex than World3, or any of its successors. The World consists of systems within systems within systems. It also includes such wild-card elements as political scandals, breakthrough inventions and renegade dictators. The World includes the beauty of Mozart and fine architecture and the Bolshoi Ballet, as well as the tawdriness of a casino on a slow Monday night. The World is more than just people, culture, machinery and the movements of capital, though it includes all of those, together with human qualities like courage and vanity and greed. The World, to dig deeply into its origins in Old English, is ‘the age of man’. Or, since ‘man’ is thought to be an old word for ‘consciousness’, the World is ‘the age of consciousness’. No one could presume to build a model of that.

But the beauty of World3 lies in the mathematics. Barring cosmic intervention, a population growing at 2 per cent per year always doubles in 36 years, unless something happens to change that growth rate. This is undeniably, unalterably true, whether it happens in World3 or in the World – or on Mars, for that matter. So a computer model like World3 cannot be discounted simply for being a model,² because mathematics is the link between the computerized fiction and the flesh-and-blood reality. Mathematics makes the rules in both Worlds. The computer simply automates the task of calculating numbers, while compressing time: in World3 (and its successors), you can watch a hundred years flash by in a few seconds. In the World, a hundred years takes a hundred real years – and if you don’t like what happens, you can’t push ‘Reset’ and start over. In World3, numbers representing human populations go up and down, just as they do in the real World, but without the attached drama of real human lives, with all their joys and sorrows. The potential avoidance of foreseeable, real sorrows is what makes World3 worth contemplating.

What happens in World3 is not exactly a forecast; it is, you might say, a parallel reality. In that alternate reality, the unrestrained expansion of people and their stuff makes everything go haywire, and civilization collapses sometime in the middle of the 21st century. Does that mean the real World is doomed to the same fate? Not necessarily. Unlike the virtual citizens of World3, real human beings have the power to become aware of danger and to change course in order to avoid it. Our World is, after all, ‘the age of consciousness’, a feature decidedly lacking in the computerized version.

But despite its toy-truck qualities, World3 teaches us something of devastating importance: if unrestrained growth continues in the real World, a future collapse is certainly possible, and may be inevitable. The mathematics of growth are driving us ever more rapidly beyond the limits of the Earth’s capacity to provide resources and absorb wastes; but it is still not too late to change course, draw down, pull back from the brink. There are enormous challenges to be overcome, but we can overcome them, so long as we exercise that distinguished quality of consciousness to its fullest extent. It’s a question of choice.

This was the message that the young authors of The Limits to Growth began trying to deliver in 1972. They were seriously and politely received into the halls of power, and their message was echoed around the World via the media. Their arguments were considered by some of the greatest minds of the day. Many, especially those in the Club of Rome, praised and publicized their work. But the young authors were quite naive about the ways of power, politics and publicity. They mistook open doors and smiling faces for acceptance, and it came as a rude surprise when they were viciously attacked by their peers, their work was vilified in the American press and, most painfully, their message was subsequently ignored.

Today, we live in a World of swelling populations concentrated in the poorest regions, disappearing fish and freshwater resources, declining food production per capita, global financial turmoil, increasingly desperate migration (often caused by natural or environmental disaster), rising conflict over land and resources, toxic pollution affecting nearly every living organism, and a dangerously changing climate caused by the ever-increasing emissions from our cars, power plants and factories. ‘Growth’, meaning the number of human beings and how much stuff they use up and discard, shows a few modest signs of slowing down, but at nothing like the pace required to avert far worse catastrophes than the ones already being suffered by the poorest and most vulnerable in places such as Bangladesh, Honduras and the Maldives. We are not yet living in the global collapse envisioned by World3, but some of that computer model’s downward-plunging curves are beginning to look frighteningly similar to patterns in some parts of the World, and to our own possible and increasingly probable future. In some areas, including climate, we appear to have already passed the point of no return; we can no longer prevent some of the changes we have already set in motion, and must direct our efforts to adapting to those changes, while also striving for the restoration of stability in natural systems.

But according to the common wisdom among people who still vaguely remember it, The Limits to Growth was a provocative but flawed book whose ‘predictions’ turned out to be ‘wrong’.

Carmel, California

Late summer 1981

I am driving with my friend Martin down the coast to visit Ansel Adams’s house. The great nature photographer won’t be home, but his assistant is an old friend of Martin’s. We’ll have the run of the place.

Martin was one of my professors in college, and he taught a course in Ecoscience that made a huge impression on me. He was an odd duck – always wore short pants and suspenders, and talked with a slight, inauthentic British accent – but he was passionate about this topic. We read books on population, ecology and the growing impact of technology on the environment. We read The Limits to Growth and Small is Beautiful.

That’s why I’m having such a hard time understanding why Martin, a geologist, has now gone to work for an oil company, helping them to find new deposits of fossil fuel.

On arrival, Ansel’s actual house proves to be a bit dull – very few of his famous black-and-white landscapes are in evidence – but then John, the assistant, takes us down to the cove. This isn’t just any spectacular cove on the Carmel coast; this is Ansel’s cove. He owns it. I’m not sure if that means he also owns the seal that pokes its head up out of the kelp and stares at us, but the sight of it makes John’s dog, an Irish setter, go berserk. He dives in and swims out toward the seal, barking wildly.

When the dog gets within about ten feet of the seal, the little rubbery head disappears. It pops up moments later about 30 feet behind the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition
• A Note on Usage
• Prologue
• Part I Cassandra's Dilemma
• Part II Reinventing the World
• Notes
• Sources
• Index