Changing

Abstract

Growth can be good or bad: it depends what is growing, and how big it is relative to its surroundings. At the end of the last chapter we began to look at one of the simplest mathematical models that can be used to describe growth—the exponential model. You might remember from the introduction that many quantities that measure human activity and impact on the world around us seem to have followed this simple growth model, at least for the last couple of hundred years.