Maybe you haven’t heard about it. After all, it’s a taboo. We tiptoe around the subject of population growth as though it could give you a bad case of leprosy. Even when the topic is addressed, the word “overpopulation” is frequently avoided. Presidents, journalists, and humanitarian and environmental organizations head for the hills when the conversation turns to the role of population growth in hunger, poverty, climate change, species extinction, fresh water availability, desertification, deforestation or fisheries depletion.

I’ve written about this before. My GrowthBusters film put a spotlight on it. I’ve posted YouTube videos about it (see list below), and others have written on the subject. But it’s not everyday we get such an overt, classic, textbook example as the one delivered on a silver platter last month by the U.S. State Department. It was chronicled nicely in The Australian. . . .

The new movie, FrackNation, is a propaganda piece that shucks and jives around the truth in effort to assure us we can safely, and should, frack, baby, frack.

This film had its broadcast debut last night on AXS TV. FrackNation is less about the science behind hydraulic fracturing to free up oil and gas from shale rock formations, and more about warped definition of progress and our faith in technological miracles.

Fracking, as it is commonly called, involves directional drilling, fracturing the rock formation, and injecting a mixture of chemicals (some toxic, some carcinogenic), sand and water into the well under high pressure. This method of energy exploration and production came into widespread use in the U.S. only after the industry was exempted from some provisions of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Superfund (CERCLA) Act in a piece of 2005 legislation. This is known as the Halliburton loophole, because Halliburton is a huge oilfield services provider making a gazillion dollars fracking wells for the industry. This change in the law was reportedly shepherded by former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney while he was Vice President of the United States. . . .

Okay, I get that we are at the end of growth. What should I do with that information?

Yesterday I had a nice conversation on the air with the hosts of  Spread Peace Radio. You can hear our discussion here (the 1/19/13 episode), which was wide-ranging, but did touch on what we can or should be doing to embrace the end of growth.

While it is challenging to get past our addiction to growth, living sustainably doesn’t mean a dismal, uncomfortable existence. In fact, it frees us to enjoy the good things in life!

There wasn’t time to fully explore that subject, so I promised the listeners I’d blog about it today. If you came to the blog after listening to that show, welcome. I hope you’ll subscribe to the blog (right side of this page) and I invite you to participate in the conversation by adding your comments below. This to-do list is not comprehensive, so I hope you’ll add your suggestions here. . . .

Last night I gratefully accepted a Global Media Award for best film or miniseries for my film, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. The Global Media Awards are presented annually by the Population Institute to recognize significant contribution to public discussion and understanding of issues related to population growth. I’m thrilled the film is getting this recognition, alongside such honors as being selected to screen at 11 film festivals so far. (Click on photos below to enlarge.)

We had some fun as I thanked two of the smartest sustainable population advocates/experts I know, Population Institute Chair Bill Ryerson and President Bob Walker, for our award. I presented each with a GrowthBusters movie poster. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, we had replaced me as the lead growthbuster on the posters with Bill and Bob. . . .

We risk a global collapse of our civilization as we know it. Climate change is just one of our problems. We cannot avert calamity without tackling it and other pressing ecological concerns in concert.

Ehrlich perspective in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
For DailyClimate.org

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a press conference was held at the National Press Club with the goal of trying to inject environmental issues into the debates. It failed miserably, but it was also informative because every question asked by a reporter was about global warming. . . .