Return to Growth

In its famous doomsday treatise four years ago, the Club of Rome depicted a world consuming its resources and polluting itself at a rate that--if continued--would ensure its early destruction. The only hope for global salvation was suggested in the report's title: The Limits to Growth.

Last week the businessmen and professors who belong to the Club met again in Philadelphia and rejected the notion of no-growth (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). If world poverty is to be conquered and world peace attained, the Club now agrees, further selective growth is not just desirable but essential.

Some of the Club's new proposals for global controls and planning were highly questionable, but its basic turnabout was laudable. A world threatened by starvation and widening economic imbalance between nations must have development, not stagnation, of industrial and natural resources. Moreover, in an economically shrinking world without growth, political freedom would almost certainly disappear, giving way to regimes that ration not only goods but people's lives.

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