"The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.[1] It was commissioned by the Club of Rome and was first presented at the 3. St. Gallen Symposium. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, J?rgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The book used the World3 model to simulate[2] the consequence of interactions between the Earth?s and human systems. The book echoes some of the concerns and predictions of Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Five variables were examined in the original model, on the assumptions that exponential growth accurately described their patterns of increase, and that the ability of technology to increase the availability of resources grows only linearly. These variables are: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth trends among the five variables under three scenarios. They noted that their projections for the values of the variables in each scenario were predictions "only in the most limited sense of the word," and were only indications of the system?s behavioral tendencies.[3] Two of the scenarios saw "overshoot and collapse" of the global system by the mid to latter part of the 21st century, while a third scenario resulted in a "stabilized world."[4]