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  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    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
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist

A GrowthBuster’s Work is Never Done

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today we announced to the world a crowdfunding campaign for our new TV series (in development), Conversation Earth. If you support our GrowthBusters work, you’ll want to help us meet and exceed the modest $15,000 goal.

Why a TV series? An opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times purported humans are above nature. It claimed our technology can overcome any limitations we might create by paving over habitat, overfishing, damming rivers, pumping aquifers dry and overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. (read my full critique at www.growthbiasbusted.org)

It’s astonishing we have scientists (granted, it’s a minority of them) writing this kind of nonsense, and disappointing a prestigious, widely read newspaper publishes it. This reminds us we still have very important work to do, replacing the growth mythology that’s paralyzing society as we steer our civilization straight toward the cliff. . . .

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Planetary Overload: Faked Out by the Holy Grail of Economic Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Earth Overshoot Day 2013Today (August 20) is Earth Overshoot Day, according to scientists at Global Footprint Network. That means in about eight months we’ve consumed the renewable resources the Earth takes a year to replenish. If we want to live sustainably and leave our children a world worth inheriting, we need to turn off the lights, stop eating, drinking, driving, flying, and shopping – and hold our breath for the rest of the year – to make up for our unsustainable rate of resource use.

WWF’s Living Planet Report tells us we’re using 50% more resources each year than the Earth can replenish. That’s why we’re seeing climate disruption, fisheries collapsing, aquifer and river levels dropping, fertile soil declining and deserts expanding. In the U.S. we’re actually using resources at five times the sustainable rate. Overshoot Day for the U.S. was back in March! . . .

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Your Prediction of Earth Overshoot Day

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

In 1980 William Catton published a book titled Overshoot, which outlined how the scale of the human enterprise had outgrown our planet. Every year scientists at the Global Footprint Network calculate the day humanity crosses into overshoot for that year. They’ve dubbed it Earth Overshoot Day, and it’s coming up. I’m inviting you at the end of this post to predict when that day will fall this year.

What, exactly, is overshoot? It’s a critical concept to understand, because it is directly related to the concept of sustainability and the ability of humankind to stick around.

A simple way to explain overshoot is analogizing Earth’s resources and ecosystems to your savings account at the bank. In Earth’s case, we don’t get to make new deposits into our natural capital account. We have to make good use of what is on the planet. Just as your savings account earns interest, Earth’s resources are replenished. Acorns fall and new trees grow. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and put oxygen back into the atmosphere. Fish reproduce. . . .

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Should We Stop Worrying and Love the (Population) Bomb?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today is World Population Day, observed in many ways around the world. Every year at this time I survey the landscape and assess our progress toward achieving a sustainable world population.

There is good news and bad. Overall I think progress is being made on my goal of getting overpopulation onto our radar screens. More about that below.

First I want to highlight the efforts of the GrowthBusters project to have more awareness and information about the subject:

1. Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family

2. Top 10 Population Films of All Time

3. Our new video, Should We Stop Worrying and Love the (Population) Bomb:

Next, the bad news. Here are the things that are bugging me today about the world population situation: . . .

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Top 10 Population Films of All Time

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

As we observe World Population Day (July 11) I thought I’d share some of the most interesting films about human population, or least films with significant population themes.

I posted a list of the films I was considering, and invited you to vote for your favorite (or nominate others), so I could rank them by popularity come World Population Day 2013. So here they are, in the order you ranked them. I’m leaving the voting open on this page, so I’ll come back and revise this list if the voting swings significantly.

Be sure to check out www.worldpopulationday.org for other outstanding videos and other population news.

 

#1: GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth (2011)
I directed this documentary challenging the myths linking growth with prosperity and fulfillment. It explores how our beliefs about economic, consumption and population growth prevent rational responses to evidence we’ve outgrown the planet. I’m biased, but this film belongs on the list because of its honesty about overpopulation and exploration of the topic’s taboo. GrowthBusters includes interviews with a host leading thinkers like Paul Ehrlich, William Rees and Herman Daly. It also chronicles my own David vs. Goliath adventures in growthbusting: “My mission is to make it okay to be against growth.”
Available on Pivotshare, Amazon, and direct from producer . . .

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