DOOMSDAY predictions are funny things. We are predisposed to pay attention to bad news, and the news industry thrives on disasters. There is a good reason for this. We need to be warned of difficulty and danger so we can protect ourselves. Traffic reports do not dwell on empty roads 鈥� they tell us where the jams are. Forewarned is forearmed.
Yet our fascination is fickle. If the warning is too scary or distressing, we attack the messenger as a doom-monger. Take the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, one of the first efforts to predict the future using computer models. It found that if trends in population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continued unchanged, resources would eventually run out.
Today, The Limits To Growth is regarded by some as an overly pessimistic, doom-mongering book whose predictions were largely disproved. Yet that judgement mainly reflects the storm of anger and denial the book received when it was published. In the early 1970s, few people accepted that human activity could have global impacts or that resources were finite.
Advertisement
Such ideas are commonplace these days. Our dwindling resources show that The Limits to Growth was after all. Indeed, the book鈥檚 general conclusion is virtually identical to the latest descriptions of how civilisation will crash, which emerge from different kinds of analysis, including studies of how complex systems behave (see pages 鈥淭he end of civilisation鈥� and 鈥淎re we doomed?鈥�).
What the critics of such forecasts miss is the fundamental purpose of the exercise. Issuing a warning 鈥� based on the best available science and thinking 鈥� is intended to trigger action. If the warnings predict great doom and gloom, so be it. They are needed all the more.
That said, expert opinion is divided on how we should react to the risk of collapse. Some feel we must stave it off at all costs, otherwise the whole economic edifice that provides for human well-being will come crashing down. Others feel collapse is inevitable, even necessary if the habits that most damage our fragile home are to change. They argue that the job now is to manage collapse and even use it constructively.
This issue is truly important. Our civilisation is more technologically sophisticated than any that has faced the abyss before. Does this mean we can stave off collapse? Do we cling as long as we can to what we have, or plan now to respond to its inevitable unravelling by building something better 鈥� and inevitably different? This is a debate we must have now while we still have choices. Dismissing it as doom-mongering will not invalidate the warning.