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Club of Rome
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The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. It was founded in April 1968 and raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report Limits to Growth. In 1993, it published followup called The First Global Revolution. According to this book, "It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose....The common enemy of humanity is man....democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead."
Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist.
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The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. It was founded in April 1968 and raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report Limits to Growth. In 1993, it published followup called The First Global Revolution. According to this book, "It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose....The common enemy of humanity is man....democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead."
Formation
The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist. It was formed when a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry, met at a villa in Rome, Italy, hence the name.
Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch and Alexander Christakis were responsible for conceptualizing the original prospectus of the Club of Rome titled "The Predicament of Mankind." This prospectus was founded on a humanistic architecture and the participation of stakeholders in democratic dialogue. When the Club of Rome Executive Committee in the Summer of 1970 opted for a mechanistic and elitist methodology for an extrapolated future, they resigned from their positions.
The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 30 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best selling environmental book in world history. Kevin J. Krizek and Joe Power article: "A Planner's Guide to Sustainable Development" (Planning Advisory Service Report # 467, American Planning Assoc.) mentions this source and his author as stating that Paul Ehrlich's predictions in his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb" will come true within a century. 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.
At that time, the Club of Rome had an informal "inner group" of six, but no corporate existence. The inner group consisted of:
Organization
According to its website, the Club of Rome is composed of "scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies."
As of August 2008, the Club has two Co-Presidents, Dr. Ashok Khosla of India and Dr. Eberhard von Koerber of Germany, and two Vice-Presidents, Professor Heitor Gurgulino de Souza of Brazil and Dr. Anders Wijkman of Sweden. Other active members include: Benjamin Bassin, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Juan Luis Cebrian, Orio Giarini, Talal Halman, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Javier Solana, Mugur Isarescu, Kamal Hossain, Esko Kalimo, Ashok Khosla, Martin Lees, Roberto Peccei, Maria Ramirez Ribes, Victor A. Sadovnichy, Keith Suter, Majid Tehranian, Raoul Weiler, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Annual Meeting of 2005 took place in Norfolk, Virginia, at Old Dominion University. It was held for the first time with members of the young think tank tt30.
Offshoots
In 2001 the Club of Rome created tt30 as a spin-off, an anticipatory thinking youth think tank for people around the age of 30.
There are national CoR associations in many nations, including a number of European nations, USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Asian nations. These associations analyze national problems in terms of the same factors and give advice nationally to decision-makers.
Criticism
Critics have charged the Club of Rome with "Neo-Malthusianism" and strong elitism in its membership, which interlocks with European power elite groups such as the Bilderberg Group and to a lesser degree Anglo-American elite members. Conspiracy theorists occasionally link the Club with various world conspiracies, notably the New World Order. Other critics have noted that the predictions made by the Club of Rome and similar pessimistic groups have generally failed to come true.
See also
The British science magazine New Scientist reported on 19 November 2008 a study by the research organisation CSIRO in Australia found "changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the Club of Rome's predictions".
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