Solutions

Chart Sources: Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972) /  Linda Eckstein

by Mark Strauss - Smithsonian Magazine - April 2012

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.

(GO TO THE SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE ARTICLE)

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

The Club of Rome

Dear Friends,

I agree with Eric- big implications, along with Janet's Sharklet forward (and the myriad of other antibacterial metallic compounds out there), make for a greater possibility of mitigating our losing fight with bacteria.  

Out in our neck of the woods, the Black Canyon Infectious Disease Forecasting Station has produced hundreds of forecast libraries for our pathogen-antibiotic resistance pairs.  How we use this information is to forecast 5 to 10 years out where the current trends of antimicrobial resistance is taking us.  Those of us who are Trekkies call the process "frequency-modulated shielding for the hospital".  What is interesting is our patterns are highly local-specific.  Meaning, if you use standard antibiotic references in the clinic such as the Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy, you would be grossly misled in terms of what antibiotics are effective against, say, Pseudomonas.  Most physicians do not use local antibiograms, and we are the first (to our knowledge) to incorporate forecasting in the decision process of what antibiotics to allow for use in the hospital.