10 February 2025 – How did you get involved with The Club of Rome?
In 1977, I was invited to join the newly formed US Association of the Club of Rome after I ran into a member of the association while traveling to a meeting in Iceland on global sustainability and we chatted about my work on marine restoration. The US Association was extremely active in those days and the interactions were vibrant, with a 100 people who were very influential in the concepts being introduced by The Club of Rome about finite resources. The US Association of the Club of Rome included many of the original writers of The Limits to Growth, Mankind at the Turning Point, and No Limits to Learning, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Mihajlo D. Mesarovic, James Bodkin, John Richardson and Barry Hughes. After several years with the US Association my involvement grew, and I became a member of the board. Over the years, there were various periods where the US Association had more interactions with The Club of Rome, and I was involved in those. In the early 2000s, I joined The Club of Rome as a member with the support of Dennis Meadows and Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, the president of the organisation at the time.
How has systems thinking influenced your work on marine life and coastal ecosystems?
Using a systems approach enables us to fairly accurately analyse what could happen if you continued on the same path, versus the results of a transition or a paradigm change.
I used to work in marine pollution, looking at oil spills, nuclear power plants, heavy metals, urban waste and a lot of other kinds of pollution. It was very dismal to see what was going to happen, but I was given a chance to begin my journey in underwater restoration when a judge asked me if I could regenerate instead of just defining the damage which had already been done. I liked that regeneration was an alternative to the definition and pulling together of all the degradations of the marine environment.
That’s one of the ways in which systems very much changed my attitude. Because I could see you have to jump off that merry go round called degradation and you must hop onto a new merry go ground of restoration before you could take positive action. Focusing only on degradation was just going to lead us to all the scientists in the world listening to the breath of the last elephant as it expired. That isn’t what I intended the rest of my life to be. This was a benefit from my understanding of systems: restoration of large ecosystems seemed a much more positive approach for me to take.
Anitra Thorhaug planting seagrass underwater
What do you believe are your greatest professional contributions?
My first round of important work was on membranes, and I used an irreversible thermodynamic model to show how substances go into living cells and how they are excluded from living cells.
That was very helpful in understanding how pollutants could enter single cell marine organisms or multicell marine organisms and kill them.
Then I concentrated on standards, there were no limits or standards at all for the impact of our actions on marine life. How much heat could you put into the ocean in the tropical part, in the temperate part and the boreal part, before you would kill the ecosystem? That was very important for nuclear power plants, all kinds of other industrial groups that put heat in or needed to focus on desalination and concentrations such as of heavy metals like radium or lead.
I think the most important work is the concept that you can regenerate underwater. Nobody was doing that at all when I started in coastal ecosystems, except for mangroves which were under reforestation efforts.The approach has been emulated with coral reefs, macroalgae and seagrass. I did pilot studies up and down a very polluted bay and then did hundreds of acres of large-scale restoration. My work was noted by people across different estuaries in Florida, who started doing the same thing and that then spread much further.
A restored seagrass bed in Biscayne Bay, Florida
Now we have a group called Restore America’s Estuaries, where people from all over the western hemisphere come together once every two years to share how much restoration they’ve done, what kind of species, what their good luck, bad luck has been and how much it costs. We are a very vigorous group which has spread across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and other areas.
On my gravestone, it will read, “She restored under the water”. That was an innovation which has led to a great deal of research, and I think a very positive outcome for the ocean. Of course, there’s always more to do, but it was a big step.
Where do you think The Club of Rome has had the most impact?
I don’t think there’s any question that The Limits to Growth changed people’s thinking. Intelligent people began to listen to the message and question – can you infinitely expand the usage of resources on a finite planet? That is still resonating. Many people have taken small parts, they’ve taken an economic part, an agricultural part, pollution, or a natural resource or energy and they’ve looked at the questions raised by the report over time and smaller geographies very carefully. I think that has been the largest impact.
However, I think the combined impact of experts from economics, environment, natural sciences, sociology, education and other subjects looking holistically at the whole world and taking that forward in time has been attempted in successful ways by The Club of Rome and five or six other institutions. The holistic view is the basis of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Providing the time and space for brilliant people of a variety of disciplines to get together and contemplate the most vexing and problematic issues and how to move those forward into the future was one of the brilliant concepts of Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and the few people around them who established The Club of Rome in 1968.
How can The Club of Rome play a bigger role in moving the dial from sustainability to a regeneration-focused world?
We need to be very clear in The Club of Rome’s message that human beings do not have dominion over the rest of nature and the rest of living things. The Bible says that they do, and history would indicate that. But indeed, if we look at evolution, human beings are just one of the subsets of living beings, and we don’t have the right to kill 85% of the forests of the world, which according to FAO from the United Nations, we have, or 70% of the coastal vegetation, or huge amounts of the biodiversity. It would be helpful if we could create more awareness across the world that we’re just one part of a complex ecosystem. Second, it would be a huge step forward if we could demonstrate and raise money for and have large projects on different continents of large-scale restoration projects. And lastly, instead of telling people what not to do, we should encourage positive projects.
For example, we could encourage individuals to take actions such as planting trees around their village or their home or their region – or anything which encourages people to reflect on the many benefits of nurturing our planet. If we could demonstrate the benefits of restoration of other species and other ecosystems, I think The Club of Rome could do a great deal of good for the entire world’s attitudes towards other living beings.
What does a regenerative society look like over the next decade?
On a global scale we need something structured to rebuild our ecosystems, almost like we have been at war. We need a “Marshall Plan for restoring major ecosystems”. The fastest way to do this is in the tropics. Tropical plants photosynthesise 12 months of the year, the temperate maybe 5 or 6 months a year, and the Arctic or boreal for 3-4 months a year. So, start in the tropics for the next 10 years and go to the areas where the largest areas have been wiped out, but where there are still some substantive forests to restore and restore with.
The benefits of restoration would by far outweigh the costs – so much so that the whole world may wake up and say this is what a regenerated world could look like. And the world will be much happier than if they’re just arguing about political differences. Volunteering time towards restoration is something action oriented that you can actually do.
