On Growth

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Preface: On Growth

This symposium about Limits to Growth is the result of a switch in journalistic interest. After having covered foreign affairs and international relations for twenty years, I discovered late in 1970 the Club of Rome.¹

In those days I was representing NOS National Dutch Television in the United States. I had learned that the US and USSR were conducting semisecret negotiations about the creation of an institute for systems analysis. I contacted McGeorge Bundy, the onetime Henry Kissinger of President John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to lead the discussions with the Soviets. He introduced me, however, to Dr. Philip Handler, President of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., who had taken over these sensitive pourparlers.

It was Dr. Handler who informed me about the work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of Professor Jay W. Forrester. Here I learned about the existence of the Club of Rome and its assignment to Forrester's system engineers at MIT² to study with computer models the limits of the planet as a whole.

Early in 1971, I began producing a documentary film on the information I obtained in Washington for NOS National Dutch Television. I included conversations with Dr. Handler (in Washington, D.C.), Professor Forrester (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Dr. Aurelio Peccei (in Rome, who is founder and chairman of the Club of Rome)³ and Dr. Djhermen M. Gvishiani⁴ (in Moscow, who is vice-chairman of the state committee of the USSR Council of Ministers for Science and Technology and corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences).

My film was shown September 26, 1971, in prime time on Sunday night, and apart from being a world premiere, it caused a major sensation

1 The New York Times described the Club of Rome on February 4, 1973, as ‘an elite international study group.’

2 Team leader was Professor Dennis L. Meadows.

3 Who is also member of the board of Fiat; vice-president of Olivetti and chairman of Italconsult, Italy's foremost think tank.

4 Son-in-law of Premier Alexei N. Kosygin.

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in the Netherlands. A Club of Rome sponsored exhibition was organized in Rotterdam, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, while it was opened by Queen Juliana. The Dutch edition of the MIT report, Limits to Growth, sold a quarter of a million copies in less than a year. During the general elections in the fall of 1972, issues raised by the Club of Rome and the Forrester-Meadows team in Cambridge, Massachusetts, turned into campaign issues.⁵

News about the plans for a US-USSR combined think tank even reached the front page of the New York Times a few weeks after the subject had been shown on National Dutch Television.⁶ In the meantime, on October 4, 1972, twelve nations signed an agreement in London to set up a joint Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in the eighteenth-century Laxenberg Palace, ten miles from Vienna, Austria. Dr. Gvishiani was chosen chairman of the institute for a period of three years. Participating nations, besides the US and the USSR, are East and West Germany, Italy, France, England, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Japan and Canada.⁷

July 6, 1972, I had a dinner meeting with Dr. Aurelio Peccei at the airport of Frankfurt. During our conversation, the plan came up to gauge, collect and publish opinions about Limits to Growth. Initially, I intended to gather some thirty interviews, ten at the suggestion of the Club of Rome. But soon, I decided not to limit myself to comments by economists, systems engineers, biologists or ecologists, but to look for reactions from a wider range of disciplines. Thus, the series grew to seventy conversations.

I regret that a rather large group of persons that were invited to take part in this project were unable to participate, owing to conflicting time schedules or other previously arranged commitments and want to mention in this respect, Jacques Monod, R. Buckminster Fuller, David Riesman, Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson), Bertrand de Jouvenel, John K. Galbraith (who was in China at the time), Konrad Lorenz, Hannah Arendt, Erik H. Erikson, J. Bronowski and others. On the other hand, it has to be realized that one could enlarge the group indefinitely, but a collection of conversations like this is also bound by ‘limits.’

I am most grateful to all participants in this project, both for their most valuable help and assistance in helping me find my way in this endless labyrinth of problems and dilemmas confronting us all in this latter part of our century, and for their strenuous efforts to shape the tape-recorded interviews, correct them and make them as readable as possible for general audiences. Most interviewees felt unsatisfied about the

5 Limits to Growth was presented to the American public and press at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., during a ceremony on March 2, 1972.

6 See the New York Times, October 14, 1971.

7 See the New York Times, October 4, 1972, report written by Richard D. Lyons from London.

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quality of their remarks, which were intended in the first place as leisurely conversations. Professor B.F. Skinner protested altogether to having an edited version of our conversation printed in this bundle, and therefore I invited a senior editor of the magazine Psychology Today, Kenneth Goodall, to rewrite the text, eventually with Professor Skinner's agreement. I do not intend this book to be a scholarly, unreadable heap of scientific language. As I found that most scientists possess a treasure chest of thoughts and opinions about the problématique of our day, I have collected some of these, as a contribution to the worldwide discussion now under way about the finiteness of all things around us, as a further contribution to a rising consciousness that generations of today or tomorrow have no right whatsoever to leave the children of tomorrow or the days after tomorrow one huge garbage pile.

I am most grateful for their continued advice and warm interest in this project to Aurelio Peccei, Margaret Mead, Jay W. Forrester and Philip Handler, who actually helped me to discover the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth study.⁸

W.L.O.

Christmas 1972

8 The author is embarked on a second series of conversations, this time in socialist nations and the Third World, likewise centered around the theme Limits to Growth.