Minqi Li: Marxism and Limits to Growth, Capitalism with Zero Profit Rate?

In this short presentation, University of Utah economist Minqi Li ties together Marxian economics, in particular the theory of capitalist crisis and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the perspective of the limits to growth. As regular visitors of this blog might have guessed, this seemed to me quite interesting. I tried to improve the sound of the original video so people might hear better.


Part 2 Part 3

Minqi Li's abstract of the paper presented in November 2006, at the Social Structure of Accumulation Conference in Ireland:

"Capitalism is a socio-economic system that rests upon the endless pursuit of profit and capital accumulation. However, after centuries of relentless capitalist accumulation, resource depletion and environmental crisis have reached the advanced stage. The paper discusses the depletion of fossil fuels, the likely effects of various renewable energies and nuclear energy on future energy supply, the limits to improvement in energy efficiency, and the depletion of other resources. It relates the limits to growth to Marx’s hypothesis on the “law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.” It can be established that if the growth rate falls towards zero, then either the profit rate or the net investment has to fall towards zero. The coming crisis may be seen as the expression of the conflict between the “productive forces” and the “existing relations of production”. The historical constraints and possibilities for the post-capitalist society are discussed."

Minqi Li was born in January 1969 in Beijing, China. He studied at Beijing University between 1987 and 1990 and participated in the 1989 student movement. Between 1990 and 1992 he was a political prisoner. After 1989, he rejected the bourgeois liberal ideology and moved towards revolutionary marxism. He came to the United States in 1994 and received Ph.D. in economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002. He taught political science in York University, Canada from 2003 to 2006 and since July 2006 he has been teaching economics at the University of Utah. Minqi Li is the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy.

Recent publicly available articles:
Capitalism with Zero Profit Rate?: Limits to Growth and the Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (University of Utah Department of Economics Working Paper Series, May 2007)
The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism (Monthly Review, April 2008)
Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism (Monthly Review, July-August 2008)

Nate Hagens: Umbrella View of Resource Depletion & Human Behaviour

Talk by Nate Hagens of University of Vermont on Resource Depletion, Energy Supply, peakoil, Energy Demand, Human Behaviour and Finance held at the Alcatraz 'Peak' Summit from 26 to 28 June in Italy hosted by The Oil Drum, ASPO Netherlands and ASPO Italy. Nate's presentation I witnessed this June at the informal meeting organised by theoildrum.com and ASPO near Perugia, Italy, , is extremely interesting, if more than a little speedy. I highly recommend this presentation as it served to summarise in an hour what we had been talking about at Alcatraz for three days straight.

Umbrella View of Resource Depletion & Human Behaviour from Rembrandt Koppelaar on Vimeo.

Charles Hall in New Scientist -Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil

One of my favourite academics who address the importance of natural sciences to economic issues is the loud-voiced Charles Hall. He managed to get the undiluted message of the limits to growth published right there in the New Scientist. His article is really worth a good look.

"The world today faces enormous problems related to population and resources. These ideas were discussed intelligently and, for the most part, accurately in many papers from the middle of the last century, but then they largely disappeared from scientific and public discussion, in part because of an inaccurate understanding of both what those earlier papers said and the validity of many of their predictions. Most environmental science textbooks focus far more on the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications
of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on them. The failure today to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil, indeed of peak everything, into scientific discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society.

(...)

No substitutes for oil have been developed on anything like the scale required, and most are very poor net energy performers. Despite considerable potential, renewable sources (other than hydropower or traditional wood) currently provide less than 1 percent of the energy used in both the U.S. and the world, and the annual increase in the use of most fossil fuels is generally much greater than the total production (let alone increase) in electricity from wind turbines and photovoltaics. Our new sources of “green” energy are simply increasing along with (rather than displacing) all of the traditional ones. If we are to resolve these issues, including the important one of climate change, in any meaningful way, we need to make them again central to education at all levels of our universities, and to debate and even stand up to those who negate their importance, for we have few great intellectual leaders on these issues today. We must teach economics from a biophysical as well as a social perspective. Only then do we have any chance of understanding or solving these problems."

Charles Hall Speaking at ASPO VII in Barcelona, October 2008

Shell on Trial and Antonia Juhasz on “The True Cost of Chevron"

These two in depth Democracy Now reports on Shell's and Chevron's practices of 'externalising costs' proved to provide a great deal of the history of these companies' shady dealings in the third world.



A landmark trial against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell’s alleged involvement in human rights violations in the Niger Delta begins this Wednesday in a federal court in New York. Fourteen years after the widely condemned execution of the acclaimed Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the court will hear allegations that Shell was complicit in his torture and execution.



Now Chevron’s annual report reports that 2008 was the company’s most profitable year in history. Just ahead of Chevron’s shareholder meeting, a new report released today tells shareholders more about the hidden and underreported costs of these profits. The alternative annual report is called “The True Cost of Chevron.” It brings together stories from communities across the world—Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the Philippines and the United States—all directly affected by and in struggle against Chevron’s operations. We speak to the report’s author and James Craig, media adviser for Latin America for Chevron.

Presentation: Ecological Critique of Market Society

I thought I'd post this presentation text I've written for a philosophy department course called 'Concerns of the Market'. It is aimed to be a short introduction into the ecological critique of, as the course called it, 'market societies'.

It refers to a power point presentation that can be downloaded here or viewed here.

------

1 Introduction

In this presentation, my aim is to give a short summary of the critique of market society and neoliberalism from the perspective of environmentalists and ecologists like Dennis and Donella Meadows, the authors of ‘The Limits to Growth’. This presentation will require some scientific discussion that is instrumental for a philosophical perspective. I believe that any fruitful philosophical inquiry into the moral problems of sustainability will have to rely on recent scientific discourse in order to ask the right moral questions. For example, questions like future generations’ rights to oil resources are outdated when it seems unlikely that there will be much left for these future generations, even when there is a consistent political-economic move to sustainable consumption. Rights to energy resources more generally might be more appropriate in this case.

I will break down this critique in two parts; the first dealing with the use of ‘sources’, the other with disposal of waste and pollutants in ‘sinks’. [figure 1, 2, 3] By sources is meant all natural resources that are used in an economy, from fishing stock and arable land to water supply and fossil fuels. By sinks are meant the capacities of ecosystems to absorb pollution and waste, from bacteria in rivers that break down sewage to the adaptivity of atmosphere to greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously central to this critique is the notion of sustainability. I use the word here as meaning natural-economic conditions of necessity for the realisation of any reasonable interpretation of human flourishing for most people over time. Sustainability is often mistaken as some kind of moral value by itself. But, as long as we can agree that human flourishing in the future should also be an aim of political morality, so I can skip a lengthy discussion of Derek Parfit, what other value should political action ultimately have in mind, if not sustained human flourishing for all? Sustainability, then, concerns the natural boundraries for the sustained possibility of this moral end.

The question is whether societies in which markets are the dominant mechanism of allocation of goods and services are, or can be made capable of dealing fairly and effectively with the problems of increasing scarcity of resources and pollution. In other words: is there a morally acceptable capitalist road to sustainability? As I am approaching this question through looking at natural resources and sinks, Herman Daly’s widely used criteria for sustainable use of resources and pollution I think hits the nail on the head [figure 4]. If there are no questions about this definition of sustainability, I would like to proceed with the overview of the ecological critique of market society.

2.1 Sources

In countries where the price of non-renewable resources and unsustainably used renewable resources are set by the market (or are even subsidised), there is a gap between the use value of that resource and its exchange value, the price. As any normal commodity, natural resources are traded in the market, where supply and demand determine price. According to a central justificatory thesis in neoclassical economics, which treats natural resources like any other commodity, the market mechanism ensures efficient allocation of goods; but, of course, in this case we are dealing with depleting natural resources. Once used, they are gone, and somewhere along the way of depletion, (where maximum supply exceeds demand) price is set no longer by supply, demand and marginal production cost, but by natural scarcity and shortage.

So in so far as there are good reasons to assume that the exchange value, as set by the market at times of relative abundance, is much lower than the real use value of the resource, the market mechanisms of supply and demand cannot be relied upon to allocate non-renewable resources and depleting renewable resources efficiently. It follows that a society that allocates non-renewable resources in this market-based way is, from this perspective, wasting the ‘bank account’ of elementary resources considerably.

But the critique can go more fundamental. Market-based societies are also ill-prepared to adapt to depletion and scarcity of vital resources like energy or food that its economy is reliant on. A political-economic tradition of leaving allocation of non-renewables to the market produces a dependent economic infrastructure with the high consumption patterns that result from market underpricing. These infrastructures are the aggregates of long term investment; it takes several decades to replenish without extra costs the stock of cars, ships, factory equipment, electricity plants and so on. A market-based society that finds one of its essential resources depleting can maybe change allocation systems quickly, but it is stuck with the economic infrastructure and capital stock that is accumulated over time. This kind of exposure to resource shocks combined with the highly discussed increase in worldwide inequality can have morally unacceptable consequences- think of stagflation after the oil shocks of the 70s, food or water shortages and even the collapse of civilisation like on the Easter Islands. These are results of what the authors of LtG call overshoot- when a (socio-economic) system passes its external limits.

My own literature research into the depletion of different non-renewable and depleting renewable resources has convinced me there is cause for concern in many cases; oil and natural gas production are in dangerous stages of decline considering the level of dependency of most societies on these resources. [figure 5 and 6] Potable water, fish stocks and soil fertility are, albeit in different ways, at more or less maximum sustainable levels of extraction or beyond these levels. Contrary to a still dominant academic consensus, I found that the models of the Club of Rome have been quite right so far.

The fundamental question for this course is whether sustainable use of these resources can be reached with ‘market based solutions’. My position here is a negative one. Sustainable use of resources seems to be contradictory to a central thesis in neoclassical economics and market-based politics: that supply and demand allocate resources through setting prices. This conclusion I see supported in historical economic and energy policy in capitalist countries. The countries that have made the most considerable steps towards resource sustainability, Sweden, Iceland and Cuba, have done this through direct government involvement and investment. But rather than expanding on my own political opinion now, I invite discussion on this topic after this presentation.

2.2 Sinks

The question of pollution and waste shares many characteristics with the one concerning (renewable and non-renewable) resource depletion. There are sustainable levels of pollution that can be absorbed by ecosystem sinks, but exceeding these levels for a longer time results in problems of overshoot.

The most global and well-known example of overshoot by polluting sinks is global warming. There are lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions that increase temperature, but will be corrected by the world ecosystems correction mechanisms. After a certain point, however, the ‘positive feedback loops’, or the ecosystem mechanisms that reinforce global warming, become stronger than the balancing correction mechanisms. The current scientific debate concerns when exactly this point is most likely reached. The debate ranges from 350 ppm, which was reached around 1985, to 450 ppm, which would be reached in 35 years at current rates of emission. [figure 7 and 8] This is a very serious issue: if greenhouse gas levels stay above this critical point for a longer time, the genie will be out of the bottle. Humans will have lost their grip on this potential global catastrophe.

Again, the question for this course is whether there is a credible market based road to sustainability on the pollution side of the ecology-economy system. There is one especially prominent market based scheme for reducing emissions, cap and trade. This is the system in place in the EU at the moment, and it is the one that is being proposed by the Obama administration as well. At first sight and with some generous reading of the institutional argument, it seems it could work. All that governments need to do is to set the amount of emission rights, and these can then be allocated by the market in these rights. That would mean that there is a limit for emission, while the market can efficiently decide how exactly these emission targets will be met.

But if one looks a little further into the range of institutions that are involved in these schemes, there are a lot of practical problems with such a solution that I would argue are not just accidental, but institutional and necessary. Emissions can be reduced by all kinds of administrative mechanisms (fe offsetting emissions in seperate projects abroad). Furthermore, markets in emissions rights create a secondary derivative market with its speculative bubbles, and corporations always have an interest in expanding the amount of rights that are actually issued. When the system was just introduced in the EU, for example, the market and lobbying power of big corporations like the German automobile industry was so strong it even accomplished to create rights for more emissions than are produced to begin with. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, emitting corporations universally denied global warming, in a fashion rather like the tobacco industry that denied smoking caused cancer. The history does make one suspect there is a logic in this so called 'partnership of the state and the private sector'. Most environmentalists, and myself included, would argue this is because corporations always have an interest in externalising costs and internalising profits, and will use their resources to obtain their end. This market power of corporations is an institutional fact that directly contradicts any credible move towards sustainability. As long as the market is at the centre stage of environmental policy, this policy will be the result of a tug of war between even the most well-meaning governments and international governmental bodies on the one side, and corporations that externalise the cost of battling against their pollution on the other.

3 Conclusion

If one tries to imagine a credible integrated road to sustainability on all the vital topics adressed and more there seems very little room for market dominance. The most market-based ideas that aim to address these issues in cohesion all emphasise a need for stable and unjeopardised move on the different fronts, requiring price stability for long term investment. A good introduction into these arguments is supplied by Richard Heinberg in 'The Oil Depletion Protocol'. This necessity implies a government setting prices and pushing the market in a sustainable direction. But such a scheme will have to fight the same battle with contradicting economic institutions and mechanisms, like corporate lobbying and externalising of costs. Therefore, considering the actual scientific debates and economic-political practice, I am led to the more philosophical conclusion that capitalism is inherently unsustainable. Real solutions for the problems of an overshooting ecologic-economic system necessarily lie outside market thinking and market practice. Whether this should be a reformist taming of the forces of the market or a radical overcoming of its logic I leave up for discussion. In any case, it seems only a fool could expect that forces from within capitalism itself will save it from its own overshoot.

Nate Hagens on Energy, Resources and Human Demand on a Full Planet

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Nate Hagens is an ex vice president of Lehman Brothers who voluntarily left his business career some years ago out of concerns about 'negative externalities'. Now he is doing his PhD at the University of Vermont Gund Institute for ecological economics, establishing connections in his research between the limits to growth and different possible responses, both in terms of alternative energy sources and change in consumption behaviour. I don't always like his reductionist take on questions of behaviour and ideology, explaining patterns of behaviour in terms of biochemical brain functions, but he has a lot to say about the predicament of the limits to growth.

His university page introduces Nate Hagens in these terms:

Nate is studying the impacts that a decline in liquid fuels will have on planetary ecosystems and society. On the supply side, he is exploring net-energy comparisons of the primary alternate fuel sources to oil: coal, wind, nuclear and biomass. While many new energy schemes will produce profits from a bottoms-up perspective, an EROI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) analysis from a top-down perspective limits the scope of energetically and ecologically sound replacements for fossil fuels.

Because of this, real progress on the human and planetary scale issue will likely come from a reduction in consumption. On the demand level, Nate is studying the evolutionary mechanisms that cause humans to seek novelty, act impulsively, and value the present over the future (steep discount rates). Specifically, our neural plasticity combined with a culture promoting growth and consumption results in biochemical positive feedback loops akin to addiction. We can however, be happier, healthier and more sustainable by consuming less, if we are provided with a different cultural carrot. Nate’s thesis lies in modeling sustainable scale solutions to the future decline in EROI by researching ways to reduce the steepness of our discount rates, thus giving more weight to the planet’s future.

Report: The Interplay between Climate Change and Peak Oil

This week, my friend Rembrandt Koppelaar nicely summarised a recent study by ASPO Netherlands on the interplay between climate change and peak oil. Read the whole article on theoildrum.com.


Changes in the oil market and climate change are generally seen as separate phenomena. Although it is common knowledge that fossil fuels are the predominant source of CO2 emissions, the interplay between these emissions and fossil fuel scarcity is a topic that has scarcely been researched.

A new report from ASPO Netherlands provides a focused view of the interplay between these two themes. The report indicates that while the peaking of oil production would by itself have a favorable impact on carbon dioxide emission, this beneficial effect may be mostly offset by increased emissions from unconventional oil production. The report can be downloaded here (PDF, 2.4 MB, 56 pp) and a summary can be found below the fold.

Richard Heinberg on Peak Oil and Energy Policy

Ecologist Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute presents at the Conference on Michigan's Future: Energy, Economy and Environment in November 2008. Heinberg is one of the world's formost peak oil educators, having authored four unique and compelling books on the subject. In this presentation, Heinberg discusses the history of human's control of energy and what can be done to prepare for the energy challenges of the future. Heinberg reviews peak oil depletion and takes an overall view on what we need to do to find the path to sustainability.

'Peak Everything', 'The Oil Depletion Protocol', and other books by Richard Heinberg

Journalist and author Paul Roberts talks about the commercial food industry and the need for a broader systemic approach for confronting the global food challenges facing the world today. He had before been a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine and writes primarily about "the complex interplay of economics, technology, and the natural world".

'The End of Oil', 'The End of Food', and other books by Paul Roberts

Mathematician dr. Albert A. Barlett on exponential growth and society. Bartlett makes a powerful application of the exponential function on the topics of economy, energy, and population.

Dr Robert Costanza, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics gave a talk at Wellington’s Victoria University on the best response to the ecological and financial crises that are unfolding.

Bestselling author and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan. He explores the ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume in the twenty-first century. Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Why bother?

In many ways, what this page is all about is a combination of a positive perspective of advancing the plight of common people with a negative acknowledgment of the limits to growth. This combination is a contradiction in terms to many people, and so, most of the time, political debates keep to one topic or the other. That's why, on the one side, 'Malthusianism' is a derogatory term for misanthropes who really want a 'cleansing' of our overpopulated planet. (Texas radio host and New World Order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones actually puts Henry Kissinger and the Club of Rome in one and the same category.) On the other side it explains why 'peakniks' often find Chavez' use of oil revenues to create a welfare state naive in the extreme.

Issues like peak oil, the current world wide economic collapse and climate change tell us about how life has become harder and will become much harder still in the future. Looking through all the literature and information it seems like the era following the second world war was a friendly time of rising prosperity and the consolidation of the middle class, accomplished by pushing problems into the future, with the future beginning just about now. From this perspective, many people discard the aspiration for a good life for all people on this planet as a tragic wild goose chase, reminiscent of Tantalus' eternal torment in Hades.

It is very understandable that the limits to growth have turned precisely those committed people with a social conscience into utter fatalists. How can humanity possibly improve its fate when at a peak of prosperity inequality has spiraled out of control, leaving half of the world population in dire poverty and lacking the most basic of necessities? In a desperate attempt for some kind of hope and meaning, these environmental (and/or Marxist) determinists retreat into a more soothing geological timescale. They hope that even if we are not able to stop the ongoing collapses of the economy and ecology and the societies that depend on them, wiser future generations will scavenge a sustainable economy out of the corpse of industry and the natural resources it left unscathed.

I have been, and in darker moods still am one of those fatalists who retreat in their impotent determinism. The scarce forces that point in the good direction are so often so lacking in coherence and determination. But even if our darkest fears will play out as predicted, it would be good to know that someone tried to do something. You probably heard that one before, so let me put the argument another way; I also know that there are more than one or two possible futures, even if there are increasing natural boundaries to what is possible. As anyone who traced back the contingencies of his birth knows, the present world is the result of an infinite number of causes, both natural and human. Like ripples in a pond, actions that seem insignificant might change the world incrementally in unexpected ways, and you never know what is possible unless you take the initiative to find out.

What I have become increasingly convinced of is that as scarcity, climate chaos and economic collapse become ever more frightfully real, we should least of all abandon our social ideals. To many of us in the West solidarity has a quite abstract meaning; it means softening the sharp edges of the market, or giving a coins to charity. We have quite forgotten to practice the moral convictions that now seem like intellectual allegiances. As life gets tougher, we might actually have to make some more concrete life choices; we might have to share our food even if that means that we have no desert ourselves. We might have to start really opposing the international trade regime that has so systematically kept the third world underdeveloped to stimulate overconsumption in the West, in stead of just bandaging the results of this scandal with our charity money. To take seriously the imperatives of ethics, to do something for the other will only gain in its already critical importance, in small scale daily life or in grand scale international politics.

Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurter theorist and co-writer of the profound 'Dialektik der Aufklärung' is famous for saying that ethics should not be about individuals solving dilemmas in concrete life situations, but about avoiding that individuals find themselves in those situations. In other words, it should be a philosophy of social systems, not of the actions of the morally autonomous individual. I believe we need both. If we just do systems ethics, the now disappears as a moment of action and ethics becomes an interesting but ultimately pointless battle of ideology, while actual politics is left to the usual players. On the other hand, if we just do dilemma ethics, we get things like the hypocritical and shallow practical ethics that Peter Singer has been trying to escape from.

In stead, we need an ethics that is visionary enough to imagine all kinds of ways to advance the plight of common people that are now still unthinkable or politically impossible. We need that kind of broad understanding and orientation now, and in the dire years to come, to shape better societies than the ones existing now. But a better society has always been a long way away. For the shorter term and more limited scope we also need to think seriously about the moral choices that we face while we are still living in the self-destructive and often cruel systems that are in place at the moment. And, to use a rhetorical trick again, even if everything goes wrong, I would still prefer to live in a broken society in which people share their scarcities than in one where people fight each other over them. The point is that only by taking seriously both of these dimensions of ethics, both Singer and Adorno, can we profoundly make sense of what we should do to curb and to mitigate the tide of the collapse of economies, ecosystems, and societies that we are very concretely facing.

So to retreat into a deterministic analysis of capitalism, population growth, and environmental destruction I think is a mistake. Not because the analyses are wrong, but because it denies the present of its importance, being the only sliver of history over which we have any kind of influence. Capitalism may be inherently expansionist and self-reinforcing, poverty and population growth may be locked in the most cruel of positive feedback loops, and we may be too late to stop both serious climate change and the peak oil worst case scenario, but never will I give up on the only thing that can prove the predictions wrong; action by conscientious and strategically savvy people in the here and now. And I hope that anyone kind enough to read this article to the end won't, either.

Review: Limits to Growth, the 30-Year update

'Limits to Growth' first appeared in the 1972, when students of Jay W. Forrester (the founder of system dynamics) unleashed a fundamentally important discussion on whether the planet could continue to sustain growing populations and ever growing levels of consumption and industrialisation. Unfortunately, this discussion has rarely been honest, serious or rational. All that most economists seem to know about the book is that its predictions have been proven wrong, mostly without being able to reproduce what exactly were those predictions.

The truth is that the authors of 'Limits to Growth' did not make any predictions at all. They describe what they call the fundamental problems of overshoot that result from our population-economy system's sustained growth and its reliance and impact on the world's ecology. To get some idea of what might happen in the 21st century, they set up different computer models that extrapolate different paths that humankind might take. And in stead of refuting the authors' intuitions, the experience of the 30 years after writing the first edition verified their concerns. Much more alarming information has become known on diverse issues as climate change, resource depletion, overfishing, top soil degradation, desertification, the limits and changes of the water cycle, and many more issues that are critical in ecology, economics, and society.

However careful the 'Limits to Growth' authors were with making exact predictions of the future, their view of the human predicament is quite clearly summarised in this paragraph:
"To reach sustainability, humanity must increase the consumption levels of the world's poor, while at the same time reducing humanity's total ecological footprint. There must be technological advance, and personal change, and longer planning horizons. There must be greater respect, caring, and sharing across political boundaries. This will take decades to achieve even under the best of circumstances. No modern political party has garnered broad support for such a program, certainly not among the rich and powerful, who could make room for growth among the poor by reducing their own footprints. Meanwhile, the global footprint grows larger day by day."

One of the major virtues of this book is that it views the economy as embedded in the world ecology. From the theoretical point of view of the 'Limits to Growth' authors one does not think in dichotomies like economy versus ecology, rather we see the two intimately related. The economy is ultimately restrained by the sources and sinks of our planet. If it outgrows the limits of the sources of energy and materials, or clogs natural sinks that process pollution, the result is problems of overshoot. There is much more to ecological concerns than just global warming and the disappearance of animal species, though they are part of the puzzle. The fundamental question of ecology posed in this book is whether humanity will clash disastrously with the natural boundaries it has already crossed, or whether it learns to minimise the damage and start living in accordance with the carrying capacity of our planet. 'Limits to Growth, The 30-year Update' is without question a book you simply have to know of if you want to be aware of the fundamental predicaments that humanity confronts in these times.

Tip: The website Book Finder automatically finds the cheapest copies including shipping to your country of residence.

The Story of Stuff: The Chains of Production, Consumption and Waste