As a part of the Sustainability Solutions Café series, the Black Family Visual Arts Center showed a screening of the documentary Last Call, followed by a question-and-answer session with several people involved in the making of the film, including Enrico Cerasuolo, the creator of the documentary, and Dennis Meadows, who helped publish of the book The Limits to Growth.
Pictured is Dennis Meadows, who is featured in the film Last Call and answered questions after the screening.
The film opens with a fable of a man who invented chess. The king was so pleased with the new game that he offered the man any reward. The man asks for a single grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on; the king assents and thinks the man a fool. The twist, of course, lies in the exponential growth; the man is promised more wheat than is produced in a year in the kingdom. As a result, the king abdicates.
The film discusses the physical limits to growth faced by the world and in particular focuses on some of the potential environmental impacts of uncontrolled growth. It creates an interesting historical perspective by focusing on the initial spark that the publication of The Limits to Growth created in 1972. The necessity of action against uncontrolled growth and its consequences (such as climate change, overpopulation, etc.) is only addressed in the late stages of the film.
Jay Forester worked at MIT in looking at the complex models—setting the groundwork for The Limits to Growth, he looked at the world as a whole in terms of its various economies, populations, and trends in consumption. In this analysis of system dynamics, he views the interactions with the assumption that the structure of the whole system creates the visible behaviors; this level of interaction and enmeshed cause-and-effect lies beyond what it is typically feasible for humans to understand.
Although certain aspects of humanity are geared towards exponential growth—such as population growth and economic growth—the planet is inherently limited in its resources. The Limits to Growth attempts to warn the world against the consequences of setting themselves on a pathway of uncontrolled growth and eventually creating a critical shortage of resources such as food and energy that would forcibly re-balance the system via population decline.
In the beginning, the team at MIT that would compile the research and body of work and write The Limits to Growth saw nothing but optimism. They thought that in order to reach “sustainable” growth, the world system could simply change its behavior to avoid hitting the ceiling. The backlash that occurred as a result of the research surprised the research team; they had underestimated how intricately connected politics and economics were. Economics intrinsically thrives on growth; thus, the instinct of some political factions is to support growth at any cost. As the film notes, figures such as Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the first) looked down on the possibility that growth could be “limited”; they saw this as an attack on basic American principles.
Thus, the film concludes that although the problem grows increasingly serious, it is nearly impossible for governments and companies to see past short-term benefit and focus on long-term sustainability. Meadows speculates that capitalism and democracy themselves make the problem of global sustainability difficult to solve; although he demurs from speaking against these systems, he notes that democratic governments thus far found difficulty in taking action.
In the question-and-answer session, Dennis Meadows emphasized resilient development. He noted that the film focuses on climate, but the problem involves fresh water depletion, food shortages, contamination, and a wide spectrum of other worldwide issues created by the inherent shortages of resources. However, he emphasized the importance of individuals to live sustainably and to recognize that change comes at a small scale before it can be applied to the world at large.