Club of Rome

The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues.

Formation

The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist.

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 ISC's 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:

• Aurelio Peccei;
• Alexander King;
• Hugo Thiemann, Director of the Batelle Institute in Geneva;
• Max Kohnstamm (Netherlands), former Secretary General of the ECSC;
• Jean Saint-Geours, Ministry of Finance in Paris;
• Erich Jantsch, author of "Technological Forecasting".

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."

The current President is Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. Other active members include: Benjamin Bassin, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Juan Luis Cebrian, Orio Giarini, Talal Halman, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Javier Solana, Mugur Isărescu , Kamal Hossain, Esko Kalimo, Ashok Khosla, Martin Lees, Roberto Peccei, Maria Ramirez Ribes, Victor A. Sadovnichy, Keith Suter, Majid Tehranian, Raoul Weiler, Anders Wijkman, 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 Bilderberg and to a lesser degree Anglo-American elite members.

Conspiracy theorists occasionally link the Club with various world conspiracies, notably the New World Order.

See also

• Futures studies
• Harlan Cleveland - DIKW
• Limits to Growth - (Memetics)
  • Authors: Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and W.W. Behrens, III.
    • W.W. Behrens, Jr. - NOAA
    • Naval Postgraduate School
  • Peak Oil (Hubbert's peak)
• The Revenge of Gaia

External links

• Club of Rome - official website
• European Support Centre of The Club of Rome
• The German Association Club of Rome
• The Systems Method: Bilderberg and Club of Rome
• Analysis of "Limits to Growth" - Published in 1999