As an undergraduate studying environmental science in the 1990s, one of the first tasks I was asked to consider was why the authors of the seminal 1972 report The Limits to Growth1 were wrong. This report, produced by the influential think-tank The Club of Rome, had confidently asserted that increases in human population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and the depletion of natural resources would ultimately lead to the collapse of critical ecosystems. At the time, several commentators retorted that the authors had not properly accounted for technological responses to these trends, and this was the critique adopted by our university lecturers.
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