Jacques Cousteau was once quite blunt about it:
The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers: a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species... Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
Without getting into specific predictions the way Cousteau did: If that is as true as I suspect it is, the one thing it means is that we fool ourselves a whole lot. The entire picture we have created about ourselves, consciously, sub-consciously, un-consciously, you name it, is abjectly false. At least the one I think we have. Which is that we see ourselves as capable of engineering proactive changes in order to prevent crises from blowing up.
That erroneous self-image leads us to one thing only: the phantom prospect of a techno-fix becomes an excuse for not acting. In that regard, it may be good to remember that one of the basic tenets of the Limits to Growth report was that variables like world population, industrialization and resource depletion grow exponentially, while the (techno) answer to them grows only linearly.
First, I should perhaps define what sorts of problems I'm talking about. Sure, people build dams and dikes to keep water from flooding their lands. And we did almost eradicate smallpox. But there will always be another flood coming, or a storm, and there will always be another disease popping up (viruses and bacteria adapt faster than we do).
In a broader sense, we have gotten rid of some diseases, but gotten some new ones in return. And yes, average life expectancy has gone up, but it's dependent entirely on the affordability and availability of lots of drugs, which in turn depend on oil being available.
And if I can be not PC for a moment, this all leads to another double problem. 1) A gigantic population explosion with a lot of members that 2) are, if not weaklings, certainly on average much weaker physically than their ancestors. Which is perhaps sort of fine as long as those drugs are there, but not when they're not.
It's quite simple, isn't it? Increasing wealth makes us destroy ancient multi-generational family structures (re: the nuclear family, re: old-age homes), societal community structures (who knows their neighbors, and engages in meaningful activity with them?), and the very planet that has provided the means for increasing our wealth (and our population!).
And in our drive towards what we think are more riches, we are incapable of seeing these consequences. Let alone doing something about them. We have become so dependent, as modern western men and women, on the blessings of our energy surplus and technology that 9 out of 10 of us wouldn't survive if we had to do without them.
Nice efforts, in other words, but no radical solutions. And yes, we did fly to the moon, too, but not flying to the moon wasn't a problem to start with.
Maybe the universal truth I suspect there is in Meadows' quote applies "specifically" to a "specific" kind of problem: The ones we create ourselves.
We can't reasonably expect to control nature, and we shouldn't feel stupid if we can't (not exactly a general view to begin with, I know). And while one approach to storms and epidemics is undoubtedly better than another, both will come to back to haunt us no matter what we do. So as far as natural threats go, it's a given that when the big one hits we can only evolve through crisis. We can mitigate. At best.
However: we can create problems ourselves too. And not just that. We can create problems that we can't solve. Where the problem evolves at an exponential rate, and our understanding of it only grows linearly. That's what that quote is about for me, and that's what I think is sorely missing from our picture of ourselves.
In order to solve problems we ourselves create, we need to understand these problems. And since we are the ones who create them, we need to first understand ourselves to understand our problems.
Moreover, we will never be able to either understand or solve our crises if we don't acknowledge how we -- tend to -- deal with them. That is, we don't avoid or circumvent them, we walk right into them and, if we're lucky, come out at the other end.
Point in case: we're not solving any of our current problems, and what's more: as societies, we're not even seriously trying, we're merely paying lip service. To a large extent this is because our interests are too different. To a lesser extent (or is it?) this is because we -- inadvertently -- allow the more psychopathic among us to play an outsize role in our societies.
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