Wild with Sarah Wilson GAYA HERRINGTON: Complete global collapse by 2040? The prediction is “right on track”...
Aug 22, 2023
Gaya Herrington, a global collapse expert and adviser for the Club of Rome, reveals alarming insights from her work, underscoring the predictions from the 1972 MIT study about imminent societal collapse by 2040. She argues that unchecked economic growth is pushing us toward disaster. Gaya discusses the importance of systems thinking, advocating for a shift in priorities towards sustainability and human well-being. She highlights the role of indigenous knowledge and proposes transformative changes needed to avert these looming crises.
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Systems Model Predicted Today’s Tipping Point
- The 1972 'Limits to Growth' used a World3 systems model to show interacting variables can produce overshoot and collapse.
- That model predicted a peak around now and a steep decline later this century if business-as-usual continues.
Stabilization Requires Reprioritizing Growth
- Stabilized scenarios avoid collapse by deliberately stopping continuous industrial-output growth and redirecting resources to health, education and pollution abatement.
- Without that reprioritization, growth pursuit drives resource exhaustion and system breakdown.
Collapse Means Systemic Breakdown, Not Extinction
- Collapse means the previous system is permanently damaged and a new societal system forms, not human extinction.
- In the model collapse shows steep declines in industrial output, food production, welfare and population mid-century.