Chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004)

By Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows

We must be careful not to succumb to despair, for there is still the odd glimmer of hope.
-Edouard Saouma, 1993

Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability? Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes: the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries. Those revolutions were gradual, spontaneous,and largely unconscious.This one will have to be a fully conscious operation, guided by the best foresight that science can provide…. If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity’s stay on the Earth.
-William D. Ruckelshaus.1989

We have been writing about, talk­ing about, and working toward sustainability for over three decades now.We have had the privilege of knowing thousands of colleagues in every part of the world who work in their own ways, with their own tal­ents, in their own societies toward a sustainable society. When we act at the official, institutional level and when we listen to political leaders, we often feel frustrated.When we work with individuals, we usually feel encouraged.

Everywhere we find folks who care about the earth, about other peo­ple, and about the welfare of their children and grandchildren.They recognize the human misery and the environmental degradation around them, and they question whether policies that promote more growth along the same old lines can make things better. Many of them have a feeling, often hard for them to articulate, that the world is headed in the wrong direction and that preventing disaster will require some big changes.They are willing to work for those changes, if only they could believe their efforts would make a positive difference. They ask: What can I do? What can governments do? What can corporations do? What can schools, religions, media do? What can citizens, producers, consumers, parents do?

Experiments guided by those questions are more important than any specific answers, though answers abound. There are “50 simple things you can do to save the planet.” Buy an energy-efficient car, for one. Recy­cle your bottles and cans, vote knowledgeably in elections–if you are among those people in the world blessed with cars, bottles, cans, or elections. There are also not-so-simple things to do: Work out your own fru­gally elegant lifestyle, have at most two children, argue for higher prices on fossil energy (to encourage energy efficiency and stimulate development of renewable energy), work with love and partnership to help one family lift itself out of poverty, find your own “right livelihood,” care well for one piece of land, do whatever you can to oppose systems that oppress people or abuse the earth, run for election yourself.

All these actions will help. And, of course, they are not enough. Sus­tainability and sufficiency and equity require structural change; they require a revolution, not in the political sense, like the French Revolution, but in the much more profound sense of the agricultural or industrial revolutions. Recycling is important, but by itself it will not bring about a revolution.

What will? In search of an answer, we have found it helpful to try to understand the first two great revolutions in human culture, insofar as historians can reconstruct them.

Others started domesticating animals, cultivating plants, and staying in one place. That was a totally new idea. Simply by staying put, the proto­ farmers altered the face of the planet, the thoughts of humankind, and the shape of society in ways they could never have foreseen.

For the first time it made sense to own land. People who didn’t have to carry all their possessions on their backs could accumulate things, and some could accumulate more than others. The ideas of wealth, status, inheritance, trade, money, and power were born. Some people could live on excess food produced by others. They could become full-time tool makers, musicians, scribes, priests, sol­diers, athletes, or kings. Thus arose, for better or worse, guilds, orchestras, libraries, temples, armies, competitive games, dynasties, and cities.

As its inheritors, we think of the agricultural revolution as a great step forward. At the time it was probably a mixed blessing. Many anthropologists think that agriculture was not a better way of life, but a necessary one to accommodate increasing populations. Settled farmers got more food from a hectare than hunter-gatherers did, but the food was of lower nutritional quality and less variety, and it required much more work to produce. Farmers became vulnerable in ways nomads never were to weather, disease, pests, invasion by outsiders, and oppression from their emerging ruling classes. People who did not move away from their own wastes experienced humankind’s first chronic pollution.

Nevertheless, agriculture was a successful response to wildlife scarcity. It permitted yet more population growth, which added up over centuries to an enormous increase, from 10 mil­lion to 800 million people by 1750. The larger population created new scarcities, especially in land and energy. Another revolution was necessary.

The industrial revolution began in England with the substitution of abundant coal for vanishing trees. The use of coal raised practical problems of earthmoving, mine construction, water pumping, transport, and controlled combustion. These problems were solved relatively quickly, result­ing in concentratiom of labor around mines and mills. The process elevated technology and commerce to a prominent position in human soci­ety–above religion and ethics.

Again everything changed in ways that no one could have imag­ined. Machines, not land, became the central means of production. Feudalism gave way to capitalism and to capitalism’s dissenting offshoot, communism. Roads, railroads, factories, and smokestacks appeared on the land­scape. Cities swelled. Again the change was a mixed blessing. Factory labor was even harder and more demeaning than farm labor. The air and waters near the new factories turned unspeakably filthy. The stan­dard of living for most of the indus­trial workforce was far below that of a farmer. But farmland was not avail­able; work in a factory was.

It is hard for people alive today to appreciate how profoundly the industrial revolution changed human thought, because that thought still shapes our perceptions. In 1988 histo­rian Donald Worster described the philosophical impact of industrialism perhaps as well as any of its inheritors and practitioners can:

“The capitalists… promised that, through the technological domination of the earth, they could deliver a more fair, rational, efficient and pro­ductive life for everyone…. Their method was simply to free individual enterprise from the bonds of traditional hierarchy and community, whether the bondage derived from other humans or the earth… That meant teaching everyone to treat the earth, as well as each other, with a frank, energetic, self-assertiveness…. People must… think constantly in terms of making money. They must regard everything around them–the land, its natural resources, their own labor–as potential commodities that might fetch a profit in the market. They must demand the right to pro­duce, buy, and sell those commodities without outside regulation or inter­ference…. As wants multiplied, as markets grew more and more far­-flung, the bond between humans and the rest of nature was reduced to the barest instrumentalism.”¹

That bare instrumentalism led to incredible productivity and a world that now supports, at varying levels of sufficiency, 6,000 million people–more than 600 times the population existing before the agricultural revolution. Far-flung markets and swelling demands drive environmental exploitation from the poles to the tropics, from the mountaintops to the ocean depths. The success of the industrial revolution, like the previous succeses of hunting-gathering and of agriculture, eventually created its own scarcity, not only of game, not only of land, not only of fuels and metals, but of the total carrying capacity of the global environment. Humankind’s ecological footprint had once more exceeded what was sustainable. Success created the necessity for another revolution.

Only innovators, however–by perceiving the need for new informa­tion, rules, and goals, communicating about them, and trying them out­–can make the changes that transform systems. This important point is expressed clearly in a quote that is widely attributed to Margaret Mead, “Never deny the power of a small group of committed individuals to change the world. Indeed that is the only thing chat ever has.”

We have learned the hard way that it is difficult to live a life of material moderation within a system that expects, exhorts, and rewards consumption. But one can move a long way in the direction of modera­tion. It is not easy to use energy efficiently in an economy that produces energy-inefficient products. But one can search out, or if necessary invent, more efficient ways of doing things, and in the process make those ways more accessible to others.

Above all, it is difficult to put forth new information in a system that is structured to hear only old information. Just try, sometime, to question in public the value of more growth, or even to make a distinction between growth and development, and you will see what we mean. It takes courage and clarity to challenge an established system. But it can be done.

In our own search for ways to encourage the peaceful restructuring of a system that naturally resists its own transformation, we have tried many tools. The obvious ones are rational analysis, data gathering, sys­tems thinking, computer modeling, and the clearest words we can find. Those are tools that anyone trained in science and economics would auto­matically grasp. Like recycling, they are useful, necessary, and they are not enough.

We don’t know what will be enough. But we would like to con­clude by mentioning five other tools we have found helpful. We introduced and discussed this list for the first time in our 1992 book [Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future]. Our experience since then has affirmed that these five tools are not optional; they are essen­tial characteristics for any society that hopes to survive over the long term. We present them here again in our concluding chapter “not as the ways to work toward sustainability, but as some ways.”

“We are a bit hesitant to discuss them,” we said in 1992, “because we are not experts in their use and because they require the use of words that do not come easily from the mouths or word processors of scien­tists. They are considered too ‘unscientific’ to be taken seriously in the cynical public arena.”

What are the tools we approached so cautiously?

They are: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving.

It seems like a feeble list, given the enormity of the changes required. But each of these exists within a web of positive loops. Thus their persistent and consistent application initially by a relatively small group of people would have the potential to produce enormous change–even to challenge the present system, perhaps helping to produce a revolution.

“The transition to a sustainable society might be helped,” we said in 1992,”by the simple use of words like these more often, with sincerity and without apology, in the information streams of the world.” But we used them with apology ourselves, know­ing how most people would receive them.

Many of us feel uneasy about relying on such “soft” tools when the future of our civilization is at stake, particularly since we do not know how to summon them up, in our­selves or in others. So we dismiss them and turn the conversation to recycling or emission trading or wildlife preserves or some other nec­essary but insufficient part of the sus­tainability revolution–but at least a part we know how to handle.

So let’s talk about the tools we don’t yet know how to use, because humanity must quickly master them.

Visioning

Visioning means imagining, at first generally and then with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is, what you really want, not what someone has taught you to want, and not what you have learned to be will­ing to settle for. Visioning means tak­ing off the constraints of “feasibility,” of disbelief and past disappointments, and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, uplifting, treasured dreams.

Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some find the exercise of visioning frightening or painful, because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people never admit their visions, for fear of being thought impractical or “unrealistic.” They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience that they can only explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine; skeptics are needed, too. Vision needs to be disciplined by skepticism.

We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe vision makes anything happen. Vision without action is use­less. But action without vision is directionless and feeble. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate. More than that, vision, when widely shared and firmly kept in sight, does bring into being new systems.

We mean that literally. Within the limits of space, time, materials, and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new infor­mation, new feedback loops, new behavior, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures, and new powers within human beings. Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized this profound truth 150 years ago:

“Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly cor­responds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day… see how each of these abstractions has embod­ied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community, and how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons….

It follows, of course, that the least change in the man will change his circumstances; the least enlargement of ideas, the least mitigation of his feelings in respect to other men… would cause the most striking changes of external things.”²

A sustainable world can never be fully realized until it is widely envi­sioned. The vision must be built up by many people before it is complete and compelling. As a way of encour­aging others to join in the process, we’ll list here some of what we see when we let ourselves imagine a sus­tainable society we would like to live in–as opposed to one we would be willing to settle for. This is by no means a definitive list. We include it here only to invite you to develop and enlarge it.

• Sustainability, efficiency, sufficiency, equity, beauty, and community as the highest social values.
• Material sufficiency and security for all. Therefore, by individual choice as well as communal norms, low birth rates and stable populations.
• Work that dignifies people instead of demeaning them. Some way of providing incentives for people to give their best to society and to be rewarded for doing so, while ensuring that everyone will be provided for sufficiently under any circumstances.
• Leaders who are honest, respectful, intelligent, humble, and more inter­ested in doing their jobs than in keeping their jobs, more inrerested in serving society than in winning elections.
• An economy that is a means, not an end, one that serves the welfare of the environment, rather than vice versa.
• Efficient, renewable energy systems.
• Efficient, closed-loop materials systems.
• Technical design that reduces emis­sions and waste to a minimum, and social agreement not to produce emissions or waste that technology and nature can’t handle.
• Regenerative agriculture that builds soils, uses natural mechanisms to restore nutrients and control pests, and produces abundant, un­contaminated food.
• The preservation of ecosystems in their variety, with human cultures liv­ing in harmony with those ecosys­tems; therefore, high diversity of both nature and culture, and human appre­ciation for that diversity.
• Flexibility, innovation (social as well as technical), and intellectual chal­lenge. A flourishing of science, a con­tinuous enlargement of human knowledge.
• Greater understanding of whole systems as an essential part of each person’s education.
• Decentralization of economic power, political influence, and scien­tific expertise.
• Political structures that permit a balance between short-term and long-term considerations; some way of exerting political pressure now on behalf of our grandchildren.
• High-level skills on the part of citi­zens and governments in the arts of nonviolent conflict resolution.
• Media that reflect the world’s diver­sity and at the same time unite cultures with relevant, accurate, timely, unbiased, and intelligent information, presented in its historic and whole­ system context.
• Reasons for living and for thinking well of ourselves that do not involve the accumulation of material things.

We know of networks of farmers who share organic pest control meth­ods. There are networks of environ­mental journalists, “green” architects, computer modelers, game designers, land trusts, consumer cooperatives. There are thousands and thousands of networks that developed as people with common purposes found each other. Some networks become so busy and essential that they evolve into formal organizations with offices and budgets, but most come and go as needed. The advent of the World Wide Web certainly has facilitated and accelerated the formation and main­tenance of networks.

Networks dedicated to sustain­ability at both the local and the global levels are especially needed to create a sustainable society that har­monizes with local ecosystems while keeping itself within global limits. About local networks we can say little here; our localities are different from yours. One role of local net­works is to help reestablish the sense of community and relation to place that has been largely lost since the industrial revolution.

When it comes to global net­works, we would like to make a plea that they be truly global.The means of participation in international information streams are as badly distributed as are the means of production. There are more telephones in Tokyo, it has been said, than in all of Africa. That must be even more true of computers, fax machines, airline con­nections, and invitations to interna­tional meetings. But once more the wonder of human inventiveness seems to provide a surprising solution in the form of the Web and cheap access devices.

One could argue that Africa and other underrepresented parts of the world should attend first to their needs for many things other than computers and Web access. We dis­agree; the needs of the underprivi­leged cannot be effectively communicated, nor can the world benefit from their contributions, unless their voices can be heard. Some of the greatest gains in material and energy efficiency have come in the design of communications equip­ment. It is possible within a sustain­able ecological footprint for everyone to have the opportunity for global as well as local networking. We must close the “Digital Divide.”

If some part of the sustainability revolution interests you, you can find or form a network of others who share your particular interests. The network will help you discover where to go for information, what publications and tools are available, where to find administrative and financial support, and who can help with specific tasks. The right network will not only help you learn, but also allow you to pass your learning on to others.