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  • ”On the one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum. So, which impossibility is fundamentally impossible?”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”
    – Sir David Attenborough
  • ”The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence.”
    – George Monbiot
    Guardian columnist
  • ”Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
    – E.F. Schumacher
    author: Small is Beautiful
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Long-term sustainability requires a materially smaller economy (the pie) shared more equitably (not equally) by a smaller population.”
    – William Rees
    Co-originator of Ecological Footprint Analysis
  • ”We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”We can share the earth and take care of it together, rather than trying to possess it, destroying the beauty of life in the process.”
    – Dalai Lama
  • ”We’re going to need some kind of radical break with our past behavior if we’re to engineer a viable future.”
    – Mark Buchanan
    Bloomberg columnist
  • ”There will inevitably come a time that the society drastically needs to change the way it interacts with the environment, or it will lose its coherence.”
    – Sander van der Leeuw
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”The free-market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and 9 billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They’re wrong. We can be more. We can be much more.”
    – Paul Gilding
    author: The Great Disruption
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”In the short term, we must realize that we have better ways to create jobs and build the economy than holding an everything must go sale on our precious resources.”
    – Dr. David Suzuki
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”
    – Richard Branson
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein

Global Population Speak Out

Our world is overpopulated. There, I said it. Lightning didn’t strike me dead. And you’re still reading. It is okay to mention the word overpopulation. It’s okay to acknowledge population growth is not a sound success strategy for civilization. In fact it’s imperative we recognize the huge role population size plays in our efforts to become a sustainable civilization. I’m raising this issue because today marks the beginning of Global Population Speak Out. During the month of February, scientists, philosophers, statesmen and all manner of people are making an extra effort to raise the volume of dialog about overpopulation.

NoVacancyMineToUse

Global Population Speak Out is the subject of the first installment of my new GrowthBusters talk show on Next Gen. . . .

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TV Worth Watching

I’ve interviewed some very smart people for my GrowthBusters documentary, but Chris Martenson has to be one of the brightest. At the very least he is an amazing communicator. If you haven’t seen his wildly popular Crash Course, your education is not complete. If we’d all seen Martenson’s Crash Course instead of reading Tip and Mitten, the world would be in great shape today.

TipAndMittenCrashCourse

I just caught a great video of Chris’ presentation to the InnoTown Innovation Conference in Ålesund, Norway. I’m going to tell you up front, the presentation is about an hour long. So don’t start viewing if you’re on a three minute YouTube break. I suffer from a short attention span just like everybody else, but I was a half-hour into this video before I even thought to look at the clock. . . .

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Cities with Stable Population Outperform Fast Growing Cities

Metro areas in the U.S. with a stable population are proving growth is not the path to prosperity. Eben Fodor, community planning consultant and author of Better, Not Bigger, has just released a study comparing the fastest-growing metro areas of the U.S. with the slowest-growing, to test conventional wisdom that cities benefit from growth. This study ought to put the final nail in the coffin of the “grow or die” myth that misinforms public policies in many cities. Unfortunately, in most areas this myth is very much alive and well.

According to Fodor, “The slowest-growing MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) outperformed the fastest-growing in every category. The 25 slowest-growing MSAs averaged almost 1% lower unemployment rates, 2.4% lower poverty rates, and a remarkable $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009. They also had larger income gains from 2000 to 2009 and saw significantly lower declines in income from the recession (2007-09). “ . . .

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How to Growthbust at Home

Here’s an example of how you can do some growthbusting in your own back yard: I just posted this comment to the state of Colorado’s Draft SWSI 2010 Municipal and Industrial Water Conservation Strategies Report:


Colorado Water Conservation Board

In addressing long-term water needs and strategies, the state of Colorado needs to treat population projections not as a fait accompli. Knowing the limitations of our water resource, Colorado has no business doubling its current population – over any time period. Such population growth is not inevitable. It will happen only if the state and its communities continue to pursue economic development strategies that subsidize migration to the state. The strategies focus on attracting business (and in the bargain, population) to the state. The subsidies include economic development incentives and ad campaigns and junkets, but more importantly they sometimes include massive water projects – the cost of which is never completely passed on to the new residences and businesses requiring that water. This must change. If you really want sustainable water policy for the state of Colorado, stop accommodating and subsidizing growth. . . .

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David Gray & Annie Lennox: We Saw It Coming But We Still Bought It

An addict usually has plenty of evidence his habit is destructive. Yet he persists. An addiction’s death grip can be so strong – psychologically and physically – that we knowingly march right into the center of the death spiral of destructive behavior.

Thanks to Steven Salmony for bringing this tremendous song to my attention. Steve is a tireless crusader for modern society to stop “buying it.” You can find very interesting information at his website, http://www.panearth.org/.

David Gray wrote this song and he is joined by Annie Lennox in this powerful duet:

 

Nothing further needs to be said. But I’m putting the lyrics to Full Steam below, and also including this brief video of Annie Lennox and David Gray discussing the song: . . .

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