Limits To Growth by Donella Meadows

 Meadows, D., 1982. The Limits To Growth. New York: Universe Books.

Are there enough resources to allow the economic development of the 7 billion people expected by the year 2000 to a reasonably high standard of living? Once again the answer must be a conditional one. It depends on how the major resource-consuming societies handle some important decisions ahead. They might continue to increase resource consumption according to the present pattern. They might learn to reclaim and recycle discarded materials. They might develop new designs to increase the durability of products made from scarce  resources. They might encourage social and economic patterns that would satisfy the needs of a person while minimizing, rather than maximizing, the irreplaceable substances he possesses and disperses. All of these possible courses involve trade-offs. The tradeoffs are particularly_ difficult in this case because they involve choosing between present benefits and future benefits. In order to guarantee the availability of adequate resources in the future, policies must be adopted that will decrease resource use in the present. Most of these policies operate by raising resource costs. Recycling and better product design are expensive; in most parts of the world today they are considered "uneconomic." 

Technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state. A few obvious examples of the kinds of practical discoveries that would enhance the workings of a steady state society include: 

• new methods of waste collection, to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling

• more efficient techniques of recycling, to reduce rates of resource depletion

• better product design to increase product lifetime and promote easy repair, so that the capital depreciation rate would be minimized; 

• harnessing of incident solar energy, the most pollution-free power source