 |
Dennis Meadows | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Dennis Lynn Meadows June 7, 1942 |
| Occupation(s) | Scientist, professor, writer |
| Spouse | |
Dennis Lynn Meadows [1] (born June 7, 1942) is an American scientist and Emeritus Professor of Systems Management, and former director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire. [2] He is President of the Laboratory for Interactive Learning and widely known as a coauthor of The Limits to Growth .
Dennis Meadows was born on June 7, 1942. [3] He received a BA from Carleton College, a PhD in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and holds four honorary doctorates.
He started working at the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s.[ citation needed ] From 1970 to 1972 at MIT he was director of the "Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind". [4] Further on Meadows has been a tenured professor in faculties of management, engineering, and social sciences. For many years he was the director of a graduate program based in business and engineering. He has facilitated workshops and developed innovative and complex strategic games all over the world for decades. In addition, Dr. Meadows has lectured in over 50 countries.
He has been the Director of three university research institutes: at MIT, Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire. He is the Past President of the International System Dynamics Society and the International Simulation and Games Association.
In 1986, Dr. Meadows along with Thomas Adler and Colin High co-founded RSG (originally Resource Systems Group, Inc.) as a spin-off of Dartmouth's Resource Policy Center. RSG sought to combine academic rigor with high-impact government and business projects. Their vision was to foster sound decision-making rooted in serious data analysis to address “resource” constraints with complex “systems” (hence, Resource Systems Group). [5] [ better source needed ]
He has been a corporate board member and a consultant for government, industry and non-profit groups in the U.S. and many countries abroad. He co-founded the Balaton Group, an international network of over 300 professionals in over 30 nations involved in systems science, public policy and sustainable development.
He has received numerous international awards for his work, including the Japan Prize in April 2009. [6]
The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. It was founded in April 1968 and raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report The Limits to Growth . From 1970 to 1972 at MIT Meadows was director of the "Club of Rome Project on Predicament of mankind at MIT" [4] which constructed the world model underlying that publication.
The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Meadows coauthored the book with his wife Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III.
The book used the World3 model to simulate [7] the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems.[ citation needed ] Meadows led the team that developed this model. [8] The book echoes some of the concerns and predictions of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
The eventual purpose of The Limits to Growth was not to make specific predictions, but to explore how exponential growth interacts with finite resources. Because the size of resources is not known, only the general behavior can be explored.
There has been a major cultural shift in the thinking about global processes in the last three decades of the 20th century. In a 2004 interview, Meadows explained:
In their 1972 publication Limits to Growth, their recommendations were focused on "how to slow growth". In the 2004 Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, the message has changed. Meadows explained: "Now we must tell people how to manage an orderly reduction of their activities back down below the limits of the earth's resources." [9]
In 2014, research at the University of Melbourne confirmed that the predictions from the book Limits to Growth were largely correct. [10] Presently we are very close to tracking the "business-as-usual" scenario from the book. [11]
He has written or co-authored 10 books on systems, futures, and educational games, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. A selection:
Among his many honors and awards have been:
In 2009 he received the Japan Prize for his "contributions in the area of "Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.
In 2008 he was inducted as a laureate into the Earth Hall of Fame in Kyoto, Japan for his contributions to the preservation of the environment with pioneering academic research into sustainable resource use.
In 2019 he received the award for nature of the Foundation for Cultural Promotion in Munich, Germany
The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems. The model was based on the work of Jay Forrester of MIT, as described in his book World Dynamics.
System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays.
Donella Hager "Dana" Meadows was an American environmental scientist, educator, and writer. She is best known as lead author of the books The Limits to Growth and Thinking In Systems: A Primer.
Beyond the Limits is a 1992 book continuing the modeling of the consequences of a rapidly growing global population that was started in the 1972 report Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers are the authors and all were involved in the original Club of Rome study as well. Beyond the Limits and Earthscan addressed many of the criticisms of the Limits to Growth book, but still has caused controversy and mixed reactions.
The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. It consists of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe. It stimulated considerable public attention in 1972 with the first report to the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth. Since 1 July 2008, the organization has been based in Winterthur, Switzerland.
Jay Wright Forrester was an American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
The World3 model is a system dynamics model for computer simulation of interactions between population, industrial growth, food production and limits in the ecosystems of the earth. It was originally produced and used by a Club of Rome study that produced the model and the book The Limits to Growth (1972). The creators of the model were Dennis Meadows, project manager, and a team of 16 researchers.
Alexander King was a British chemist and pioneer of the sustainable development movement who co-founded the Club of Rome in 1968 with the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. The Club was one of the first institutions to voice concerns about the impact on the environment of unprecedented economic growth in the 20th century. "Peccei and King were lonely prophets at a time of overwhelming optimism," who did much to push environmental issues on to the political agenda. At the time of the Club's founding, King was Director-General for Scientific Affairs at the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Degrowth or post-growth economics is an academic and social movement critical of the concept of growth in gross domestic product as a measure of human and economic development. Degrowth theory is based on ideas and research from a multitude of disciplines such as economics, economic anthropology, ecological economics, environmental sciences and development studies. It argues that the unitary focus of modern capitalism on growth, in terms of monetary value of aggregate goods and services, causes widespread ecological damage and is not necessary for the further increase of human living standards. Degrowth theory has been met with both academic acclaim and considerable criticism.
Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic, professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and practitioner in the field of future studies. His professional field encompasses model-based futures studies, scenario analysis, system dynamics, sustainability, climate, energy and ecological economics. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome, a company director, member of various not-for-profit boards, business consultant on global sustainability matters and author. His publications include the seminal work The Limits to Growth (co-author), and Reinventing Prosperity.
In environmental science, a population "overshoots" its local carrying capacity — the capacity of the biome to feed and sustain that population — when that population has not only begun to outstrip its food supply in excess of regeneration, but actually shot past that point, setting up a potentially catastrophic crash of that feeder population once its food populations have been consumed completely. Overshoot can apply to human overpopulation as well as other animal populations: any life-form that consumes others to sustain itself.
DYNAMO is a simulation language and accompanying graphical notation developed within the system dynamics analytical framework. It was originally for industrial dynamics but was soon extended to other applications, including population and resource studies and urban planning.
The environmental sustainability problem has proven difficult to solve. The modern environmental movement has attempted to solve the problem in a large variety of ways. But little progress has been made, as shown by severe ecological footprint overshoot and lack of sufficient progress on the climate change problem. Something within the human system is preventing change to a sustainable mode of behavior. That system trait is systemic change resistance. Change resistance is also known as organizational resistance, barriers to change, or policy resistance.
In economic and environmental fields, decoupling refers to an economy that would be able to grow without corresponding increases in environmental pressure. In many economies, increasing production (GDP) raises pressure on the environment. An economy that would be able to sustain economic growth while reducing the amount of resources such as water or fossil fuels used and delink environmental deterioration at the same time would be said to be decoupled. Environmental pressure is often measured using emissions of pollutants, and decoupling is often measured by the emission intensity of economic output.
The Balaton Group is a global network of researchers and practitioners in fields related to systems and sustainability. The name "Balaton Group" refers to the Lake Balaton region of Hungary, where the Group was first constituted, and where most of the Group's annual meetings have taken place. The Balaton Group aims to accelerate and deepen the world's general understanding of systems, long-term perspective and commitment to achieving positive change. The Group believes that these factors are fundamental to sustainable development.
Post-growth is a stance on economic growth concerning the limits-to-growth dilemma — recognition that, on a planet of finite material resources, extractive economies and populations cannot grow infinitely. The term "post-growth" acknowledges that economic growth can generate beneficial effects up to a point, but beyond that point it is necessary to look for other indicators and techniques to increase human wellbeing.
The Seneca effect, or Seneca cliff or Seneca collapse, is a mathematical model proposed by Ugo Bardi to describe situations where a system's rate of decline is much sharper than its earlier rate of growth.
The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
Thinking in Systems provides an introduction to systems thinking by Donella Meadows, the main author of the 1972 report The Limits to Growth, and describes some of the ideas behind the analysis used in that report.
Gaya Herrington is a Dutch econometrician, sustainability researcher, and women's rights activist. Herrington is best known for being the founder of the project and foundation Stop Straatintimidatie, an initiative seeking to criminalize street harassment in the Netherlands, and for her activism and research on sustainability issues.
Interviews with Dennis Meadows:
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
