ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, a growing awareness of the long-term unsustainable contradictions between industrial societies and the natural environment led to the emergence of a research and innovation paradigm. The publication in 1972 of the famous MIT study, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, was a decisive moment. It established the grounds of an alternative paradigm positioned at the level of the interaction between a social economic regime and the biophysical environment. Paradoxically, the controversies and debates unleashed by the report were stifled by the energy crises of the 1970s, which erupted just a few months later. The explicit cause of these crises was a geopolitical conflict between the United States and its allies and the oil producing nations, but not environmental issues. The answers given to the conflict were geopolitical and contributed to the formation of the neoliberal paradigm. The problems raised by the report, the investigations and solutions it proposed, were postponed. What was kept from the report was the principle of substitution: to substitute technical progress for natural resources.
