Page "Club of Rome" Paragraph 3

The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 12 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best-selling environmental book in world history.

Published in 1972 and presented for the first time at the International Students ' Committee ( ISC ) annual Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.

The 1973 oil crisis increased public concern about this problem.

However, even before Limits to Growth was published, Eduard Pestel and Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve University had begun work on a far more elaborate model ( it distinguished ten world regions and involved 200, 000 equations compared with 1000 in the Meadows model ).

The research had the full support of the Club and the final publication, Mankind at the Turning Point was accepted as the official Second Report to the Club of Rome in 1974.

In addition to providing a more refined regional breakdown, Pestel and Mesarovic had succeeded in integrating social as well as technical data.

The Second Report revised the predictions of the original Limits to Growth and gave a more optimistic prognosis for the future of the environment, noting that many of the factors were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable, hence the title.