The last decades of the twentieth century were in part characterized by a deepening of older modern doubts about science and about narratives of social progress, an uncomfortable condition that Ulrich Beck has described as the certainty only of uncertainty. One of the vocabularies through which such conditions of uncertainty found expression in the late twentieth century was that of the idea of limits, suggested most powerfully by the domains of conservation and ecology beginning in the 1960s. This paper will discuss the place of the Club of Rome in the rise of the idea of ecological limits to human activity. In the process, it focuses on the participation by Japanese economists and researchers in the Club’s attempts to model the future course of world population, economic growth, and resource depletion. Long an icon of mid-century growthist success, Japan came by the late 1960s to be seen by systemic environmentalists as a potential testing ground for the remedies they proposed to avoid global collapse.

Scott O’Bryan is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures and in the Department of History. He teaches and writes on the intellectual history of political-economics and on the cultural history of modern Japan. He received an M.A. from Yale University in East Asian Studies in 1992 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2000. He is a member of the Institute for International Strategy, School of Liberal International Affairs, Waseda University, Tokyo Japan. His research interests include the history of social science, consumption and mass consumer culture, environmental history, urban history, and peace history. He is completing a book manuscript titled, A Fetish for Growth: National Exceptionalism and Economic Knowledge in Post-Imperial Japan, 1945-1975. His next major project, Dreams of the Archipelago, is an environmental, urban, and cultural history that narrates a variety of schemes to reshape the built environments and human geographies of late twentieth-century Japan.