Why Understanding Limits Is the Key to Humanity’s Future

... Limits exist everywhere in nature. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy—pick your field, dig into the literature, and you'll soon be struck by how everything in the universe is defined by limits of temperature, weight, volume, density, number, power, frequency, speed, and more...

All these developments together [fossil fuels, artificial fertilizers] enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all...

It turns out that fossil fuels suffer from a couple of serious drawbacks: depletion and pollution... We've already extracted all the easy stuff, and beyond a certain point it will take more energy to obtain the remaining fuels than they will yield when burned...

As we've grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we've been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well...

Not only are most people apparently willing to ignore the loss of Earth's biodiversity as long as the industrial economy can continue to keep them fed, clothed, housed, and entertained, but they are also largely unaware of the exhaustion of the materials that feed the industrial machine...

Altogether, civilization's survival dilemma in the 21st century is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot. This refers to the situation where a crucial resource temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels that can be sustained over the long run...

Wisdom says: embrace limits even as they snap back, knowing that, in the long run, everything moves toward balance...

Limits to physical and economic growth

Understanding Exponential Growth - an interactive tutorial

Al Bartlett, Professor Emeritus in Nuclear Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder. Watch Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a celebrated lecture by Al Bartlett. "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."