Each year at about this time, a motley group of academics, activists and communicators meets for a week in Hungary, on the shores of Lake Balaton some 200 km south west of Budapest.  The self-styled ‘Balaton group’ has been meeting since 1982. Their mission: to continue the work inspired by the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report – first published a decade earlier in 1972.

This year I was invited to Balaton (for the first time) to present the findings from Prosperity without Growth (published by Earthscan, November 5^th 2009). It’s difficult to explain the warmth of my reception in that delightfully eccentric crowd. Nor can I adequately express my own sense of awe at the company I found myself in. After somewhat frostier receptions in the corridors of UK policy, it was all a rather welcome relief.

Elderly Scandinavian scientists – veterans of forty years of research on environmental limits – vied with each other (and with jovially disillusioned US policy advisors from four separate administrations) to attend me at mealtimes. A stream of very much younger (and much more agile) Balatonians shyly introduced themselves and their work to me – from Japan, Indonesia, Iceland, Germany, Russia, India, Sweden, Hungary, Canada. And then, all of sudden, here was Dennis Meadows himself – the man who led the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study – thrusting his camera into my startled face to capture an unflattering mugshot for the Balaton website. When he later presented me with a personally signed first edition of Limits, it all felt slightly surreal.

On the back of that priceless and remarkably untattered volume (it would have cost you $2.75 from Potomac Associates in 1972) a certain Anthony Lewis from the New York Times muses sedately whether the book might not be ‘one of the most important documents of our age.’  Little did he guess the furore it would unleash, the bitter refutations that would confront it, or the extent of its influence on generation after generation of young scientists concerned about the future of planet Earth.

As Meadows himself admits, the original report got things wrong. Not nearly as wrong as common knowledge now supposes though. In fact, by the time the Limits to Growth: The 30 year update (Earthscan, 2004) was published, the worst excesses of resource consumption had actually outstripped the early predictions of the Limits team. Human society was moving faster towards ‘overshoot’ than even they had anticipated. And the biggest failing of the original report was not to anticipate at all the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.

The single simple message of Limits to Growth remains as valid today as it always was. An exponentially growing subsystem of a finite material system contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. The conditions of ‘overshoot’ are already present. Eventually, it will face an inevitable and unpalatable collapse. How soon is the only question.

Few now seriously deny the validity of that argument.  Yet ironically, it has become even harder to question growth in the intervening decades. The optimistic 1990s saw the rise and rise of ecological modernisation – the idea that through technology we could have our cake and eat it; that economic growth could continue indefinitely and yet be ‘decoupled’ from its material foundations and its environmental impacts.  The early years of the 21^st century have cruelly exposed us to the limits of this optimistic myth.  Curbing climate change – to take only one example – has continued to evade our best intentions.  Carbon dioxide emissions are 40% higher now than they were in 1990 – the Kyoto base year.  We’re not even going in the right direction, let alone going there fast enough.

Why is it that we’ve made virtually no progress in reducing the conditions of overshoot?  What are our chances of doing better in the future?  And why has it proved next to impossible even to raise the question of economic growth – the underlying driver of material growth – itself?

These were the questions framed by the Redefining Prosperity project which I’ve been leading for the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) over the last few years. Prosperity without Growth is the culmination of our investigation into those questions.  Published first as a report for the Commission, it has now been substantially revised for this Earthscan volume.

I’ll talk later about the arguments in the book. I’ll describe too some of the reactions I’ve had to the work. It’s enough perhaps for now to say that our primary goal was to open out space for a sensible debate on this, the most urgent challenge of our times. To provoke ‘official thought on the unthinkable’ as veteran ‘steady-state’ economist Herman Daly puts it on the jacket cover.

There are signs that this goal is already being achieved. Not just in the warm embrace of the Balaton group, who after all might be expected to welcome its critical gaze on the shibboleth of growth. But in a much broader arena. A subtle change has taken place in the months since the SDC report was launched.  A sense that the conventional wisdom about economic growth is and should be up for grabs.

Lord Stern, talking at the People's University of Beijing last week, admitted that ‘at some point we would have to think about whether we want future growth’.  It’s an extraordinary admission from a former World Bank economist and Treasury advisor.  It comes in the wake of what is perhaps an even more extraordinary letter to the Queen from a range of intellectual luminaries suggesting that there was more involved in the near-catastrophic meltdown of 2008 than failings in foresight and the complexity of the financial system .

The sense of a change in the air is almost palpable. Next month I’ll be presenting arguments from the book at the 64^th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. (I’ll let you know how that one goes!). There have also been requests from the European Commission in Brussels and the OECD in Paris.

In the meantime, my sense of gratitude for the warm reception I received in Balaton lingers on. Prosperity without Growth is – to these people – more than just the continuation of a long tradition. It’s a sign of hope that the combined voices of generations of scientists might finally begin to be heard.

Meet the Author – Film clip: Tim Jackson talks about Prosperity without Growth.