A chara, – Sadhbh O’Neill (“Limits to Growth reports vindicated as Earth faces overshoot and collapse”, Opinion, Science & Climate, September 28th), wrote: “We should aim for a transformation of societal priorities that can put humanity on a sustainable and fair path where resources are managed for the future and shared equitably by all.” A challenge for all the peoples of the world.
She also wrote: “1972 saw the publication of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report which, for the first time, assessed the impact of growth on the home planet . . . The Limits to Growth report unsurprisingly was attacked – by economists, business interests, the Catholic Church and by those on the political left and right.”
The 205-page Limits to Growth report did indeed presents a valuable study for consideration. It was not, however, the first time that the challenge facing us was raised.
In November 1970, a message from Pope Paul VI was addressed to an assembly of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation “in order to underline better the urgent need of a radical change in the conduct of humanity if it wishes to assure its survival. It took millennia for man to learn how to dominate nature . . . The hour has now come for him to dominate his domination; this essential undertaking requires no less courage and dauntlessness than the conquest of nature itself. Will the prodigious progressive mastery of plant, animal and human life and the discovery of even the secrets of matter lead to anti-matter and to the explosion of death? . . . Who still does not see this? The most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man.”
In June 1972, in his message to the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, he said: “But how can we ignore the imbalances caused in the biosphere by the disorderly exploitation of the physical reserves of the planet, even for the purpose of producing something useful, such as the wasting of natural resources that cannot be renewed; pollution of the earth, water, air and space, with the resulting assaults on vegetable and animal life?”
Our economies and technologies can lead to unintended disastrous consequences. The Catholic Church did dissent from ways proposed to control population. Today we have a world where several “advanced” countries face a demographic winter where human populations themselves face collapse. In this country we have the paradoxical situation where the Government now pays for free contraception and abortion, and at the same time now pays for assisted human reproduction. Are we missing something? – Is mise,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,
Sandyford,
Dublin 16.