characters

Aurelio Peccei

Born in 1908, Italian. A manager for FIAT, he started traveling in the ‘30s to China and the Soviet Union. During WW2 he was part of the Italian Resistance, spent a year in jail in Turin where he narrowly avoided death by firing squad twice. After the war he founded FIAT Argentina, became vice-president of Olivetti and founded Italconsult. In the ‘60s he came to know the United States, was one of the first to sense what globalization is and decided to change, devoting the rest of his life to overcoming east-west divisions and the difference between the north and the south of the world. He wrote books (The Chasm Ahead, Human Quality) and gave speeches which intrigued Soviet citizen Jermen Gvishiani who introduced him to Alexander King. This meeting spawned the Club of Rome, founded in 1968, and Limits to Growth. Peccei continued to fight for a utopia made of enlightened capitalism and world governance until his death in 1984.

Dennis Meadows

Born in 1942, lives in Durham, New Hampshire. A scientist and an expert in system dynamics, he led the MIT team that wrote Limits to Growth. He started travelling around the world in 1972 to communicate the results of their research and became the book’s incarnation. He was the most famous and recognized member of the group, but as such over the years he has had to answer personally to all the criticism levied against the book. From the early ‘70s he chose a sustainable lifestyle on a farm. He still promotes and supports study groups around the world. On a global scale his latest initiatives is the development of an educational game about the oil peak. On a local scale he is leading the effort to create a community gardening program in his town. He has great energy and enthusiasm, mixed with anger and pessimism due to too many chances for change in world environmental policies that have come to nothing. He will be the film’s main character, we will follow his initiatives and through him we will meet the other authors and Professor Forrester. In January 2009 he was awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for his contribution towards a sustainable world as founded in the 1972 Limits to Growth. It is an important sign that the anticipatory value of the book's message is today being recognized.

Jorgen Randers

Jorgen Randers is professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, where he works on climate issues and scenario analysis. He was previously president of BI and deputy director general of WWF International (World Wildlife Fund) in Switzerland. He lectures internationally on sustainable development and especially climate, and is a nonexecutive member of a number of corporate boards. He sits on the sustainability councils of British Telecom in the UK and the Dow Chemical Company in the United States. In 2006 he chaired the cabinet-appointed Commission on Low Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which reported on how Norway can cut its climate gas emissions by two-thirds by 2050. Randers has written numerous books and scientific papers, and was coauthor of The Limits to Growth in 1972, Beyond the Limits in 1992, and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update in 2004. In 2012 he pubblished 2052 - a Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.

William Behrens III

After the publication of The Limits to Growth he went to live on a farm in Maine where he was supposed to spend a sabbatical year, and he is still living in Maine today. His job is now installing domestic solar energy devices. Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers kept in touch with him, they are old friends and from time to time they visit him. The three of them will meet again for the film.

Jay Forrester

Born in 1918, he lives in Concord, close to Boston, Massachusetts. A scientist and computer science pioneer, he developed project Whirlwind in the ‘40s and ‘50s and invented magnetic memory for computers, one of the foundations which allowed the development of information technology. In 1956 he moved to MIT. He founded system dynamics, the science simulating interactions between complex systems. First he applied this new science to studying industrial dynamics, then to urban dynamics, and finally to the entire world: his book System Dynamics already contained the mechanisms which made Limits to Growth so famous, but it was too scientific and complicated for the public at large. In June 1970 he put forward his vision to the Club of Rome in Berne and on the way back to Boston he designed World, the model behind Limits to Growth. Today at 90 years old Jay Forrester maintains all the characteristics of a genius: lucid, strong and self-centered he understood and still understands complexity.

Donella "Dana" Meadows

She was the group’s humanist and a talented writer. She was the book’s main author, making it easy to understand for the public at large and charging it with hope and utopian aspirations. She was an environmental activist and was often critical of American governments and corporations. We will meet her in the film thanks to archive footage.

LAST CALL