ABSTRACT
The mystery was the sponsorship of the The Limits to Growth exercise by a seemingly opaque organisation called 'the Club of Rome' headed by an Italian businessman, Aurelio Peccei, and Alexander King, a Scottish industrialist, with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. The Limits to Growth referred to as Limits from now on in many ways epitomises the six volumes covered in this series. In essence, Limits was the first serious look at sustainable economics from the viewpoint of natural resources 'peaks', absolute food scarcity, planetary and human ill-health, and overconsumption. Limits should be revisited more for its inspirational proposals for human salvation than for its graphics. The Resilience Alliance, based in Stockholm, produced a report which may rival Limits as a basis for global rethinking over human limitations. This group looked at nine 'planetary boundaries' which, they claim, provide the 'ceiling' for future human use of ecosystem functions and global flows of chemicals, water and energy.
