Week twelve: limits to growth

Limits to growth

Since the book “limits to growth” was published in1972, there have been several studies and reports about our climate. These studies all point out that if we continue ‘business as usual”, this will inevitably lead to some form of disaster. What exactly is needed to make sure that we change in such a way that our actions do not threaten our future?

First, we need to look at Human Behaviour

Since we lead unsustainable lifestyles, by depleting our natural resources and growing in population at a rate never seen before in history, we accelerate rather than mitigate climate change. Finding reasons to continue to do so, or living in denial makes us forget about the future and have a more here and now-approach to life. People are complicated beings ans some might feel powerless to do something about climate change because it seems overwhelming. Or we might not want to cut on our incomes, if that is what it takes to save the planet. We also might look to science for the solution. We can also think about other things to blame climate change for, such as our government or cheap oil, but when we really want to do something about climate change, we need to figure out for ourselves how much we care, think about and choose to behave towards our planet. For example, we can choose to reduce consumption or use our scarce resources more wisely and distribute them more evenly or live within nature’s ability to meet our needs. This will mean that we make a choice to save the planet from ourselves (our unsustainable behaviour) for ourselves (by our sustainable behaviour) (http://psysr-climatetoolkit.org/behavior/).