Exhibition research display object 22: Limits to Growth

The book "The Limits to Growth" was internationally released in multiple languages in 1972 and published in German under the title Die Grenzen des Wachstums by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart. The book is authored by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III but was commissioned by and popularly attributed to The Club of Rome. The Club of Rome is a non-profit institution founded from a scientific institute based in Rome, and composed of politicians, scientists, academics, business leaders and diplomats with the task of solving complex and global problems.The group saw itself as acting outside the then-current Cold War partisanship, though it very much feels like a document of the idealistic though still very colonial 1960s. The book's authors utilized computer simulations based on environmental, population, and economic models, among other things, to suggest that global growth, consumption and development would become unsustainable based on the earth's limited resources. Further, it also pointed a harsh scientific light on how humans are polluting the earth, poisoning the precious resources that sustain all life..

The book was popular and its publication coincided with emerging environmental movements worldwide. Though only released in West Germany, it found its way to readers in East Germany. One person who got his hands on it was Reinhard Dalchow, Lutheran pastor of a church near the Rheinsberg Power Plant, in the parish of Menz. At the time, he referred to the book as 'his bible.' "Limits To Growth’s" focus on the earth’s limited resources bolstered the German Democratic Republic’s nascent environmental movement, which found refuge in churches and their socially engaged pastors. Mr. Dalchow began co-organizing so-called 'Environmental Sundays' within the church and elsewhere in order to call attention to water as a limited resource. As with the book, Mr. Dalchow was concerned with the overall ecological system and looked at water and water pollution in relation with the production and waste of energy, too. The theme of the first Environmental Sunday was "water." The topics of the Environmental Sundays included groundwater pollution, and topics around nature conservation related to biodiversity, agriculture, the over-fertilization of farmland, energy conservation and waste. After Chernobyl, questions around the risks associated with the nuclear power plant at Rheinsberg began to surface.