Thus Der Spiegel today. “In 1972,” the newspaper elaborates, “the environmental guru Dennis Meadows predicted in his (sic) seminal study ‘The Limits to Growth’ that the world was heading toward an economic collapse. Forty years on, he tells in an interview that nothing he has seen has made him change his mind.” Wow! I read the book in 1972. And I understand the mathematical tricks behind it, which come from Jay Forrester at MIT. But an environmental guru Meadows is surely not. And never has been. The same holds for the other authors of the book the article fails to mention. The argument was Malthusian to boot. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the environment as such. It focused on population explosion and limited resources only. Meadows is overstretching himself, no doubt. As if to prove this point, he makes a telling boo-boo at the very end of the interview. “Societies rise and fall,” he says. “They have been doing so for 300,000 years.” As far as the human species is concerned, this is stretching it, no doubt. At least by half, too. The only thing I agree with the so-called environmental guru is that humanity is still on the way of destroying itself. And this has been so for six-million years at least.