In making a film about becoming a sustainable civilization, it is far too easy to focus on the big picture – the changes needed in our consumptive, growth-worshipping system – and ignore individual behavior. I am certainly guilty of excusing, say, a filming trip by airplane to Toronto or Los Angeles, as a worthwhile environmental sacrifice. If the GrowthBusters film helps our society get unhooked from its growth addiction, the oil consumption and carbon emissions of that flight will have been worth it.

Perhaps true, but this fascinating piece (Flying Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do for the Environment — So Why Do So Many Well-Intentioned Folks Do It?) on AlterNet raises some salient points about how many of us make decisions like this every day. This article points out that those of us who are hanging our clothes on the line, riding our bikes or walking, and eschewing paper napkins, etc. are among the first to hop on a jet for a trip to an activist gathering in D.C. or Cancun or Copenhagen. I think we have to change, and in fact I am working on that. A year ago I spent 24 days on the U.S. East Coast shooting interviews and b-roll in order to do that shooting with just one round-trip by air. I’ve enlisted the help of filmmakers and journalists in London, Delhi, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Sydney so I could avoid trans-ocean flights (working on a shoestring budget made it that much easier to do the right footprint-minimizing thing). . . .

Many musicians, upon hearing about the GrowthBusters film, have offered their music and talents to the project. So I’ve decided a neat way to honor them is to release a special soundtrack album of music inspired by or inspiring the film. If you’ve recorded a song relevant to sustainability, consumption, sufficiency, simplicity, overpopulation or urban growth, and you’d like to contribute it to the album, please let me know.

We hope to have the album available for digital download or CD purchase shortly before Earth Day in April. Proceeds will help fund completion of the documentary, thus honoring the intent of the musicians wanting to use their artistry to help us in our mission. So send us yours. Who knows, maybe we’ll want to include your song in the film! If we select your song, we’ll do our best to get your music heard and appreciated, including a brief bio and a link to your music site. . . .

In Support Your Local GrowthBuster I wrote about the need to act locally – precisely because that is how we change the world. Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population are busy doing just that in Charlottesville, Virginia. I spoke with ASAP President Jack Marshall recently for the GrowthBusters podcast on This Is Next Gen.

This group of activated citizens is setting the benchmark for raising awareness of a community’s responsibility for its own footprint. I visited Charlottesville last year to shoot a segment for the GrowthBusters documentary. My observation: Charlottesville, like so many communities around the world, has its fair share of growth pushers, addicted to growth. These pushers place profit ahead of sustainability, and they do so by pushing public policies that import more people and export more footprint. . . .

There are smart voices raising awareness of the global challenges presented by population growth. I thought I’d share some of the best. Is this list really the cream of the crop? I invite you to nominate other candidates for this list by commenting below. Listed here are the pieces that have stood out for me – some recently and some over the long term. I’m sure I’m forgetting some exceptional work.

Yesterday brought the official end to Global Population Speak Out, but clearly the chorus needs to keep on singing. I’ve been focusing on the population side of the sustainability equation during the Speak Out, but we need to be raising awareness of other ingredients for our civilization to achieve sustainability. I look forward to once again digging into other topics, like economic growth and consumerism. . . .

The evidence doesn’t suggest, it shouts, that we have outgrown our planet. Our numbers and our appetites have reached deadly proportions. So why do we still insist on growing our economies? Why are we still adding over 200,000 people per day to the planet? Why is increasing production and consumption a worldwide goal? Part of it is we’ve created a system that requires constant, perpetual growth. But also at play here is a philosophy, our cultural story of why we are here. Growth has become our operating system, society’s version of Microsoft Windows. This is the subject of this week’s GrowthBusters podcast at Next Gen.

One major focus of the upcoming GrowthBusters documentary is to raise awareness of the pro-growth Kool-Aid we are served daily. Today the television, internet, newspaper and radio are a modern-day medicine show. We are barraged with a steady stream of messages telling us growth is the miracle elixir. The language used in headlines, opinion pieces and news stories doesn’t just reveal our society’s bias toward growth as a universal good; it reinforces it. It has programmed us, and now it keeps us hooked on growth. But once we begin to recognize bias in the media anointing growth the cure for every malady, it will begin to lose its power over us. . . .