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  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – 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
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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 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
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein

Help Us Eliminate Unsustainable Pro-Growth Media Bias

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

X-ray showing your brain on growth mania Please help us eliminate pro-growth bias in the news media. A flurry of news reports this morning reinforce the cultural myth that population growth is a sign things are going well. This keeps our culture hooked on growth. Over a lifetime it programs us to seek and celebrate growth.

The U.S. Census released new state population estimates yesterday, and – as usual – the flurry of news headlines and reports is providing disappointing evidence that most journalists have a pro-growth bias. It’s often fairly subtle, but if your radar for this bias is active as you read some of these headlines or stories, you can’t miss it.

 

This is a real problem in our modern culture, because it reinforces the cultural myth that growth is necessary for prosperity. We must give this myth a decent burial to speed our transition to a sustainable world. This will be a world that does not seek impossible and destructive perpetual growth, but rather seeks good and satisfying lives that leave future generations a world worth inheriting. . . .

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Who Ya Gonna Call in 2013? GrowthBusters!

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Sergeant Preston of the Yukon poster As a kid I watched a TV series about a Canadian Mountie patrolling the wilds of the Yukon. At the end of every episode Sergeant Preston would hug his faithful dog and say, “Well, King, this case is closed.”

13 months ago GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth held its world premiere to a packed house at the West End Cinema in Washington DC. Since then, community groups, environmental organizations, universities, conferences, individuals and film festivals have hosted hundreds of screenings around the world. One might think this case is closed. Film produced, film released, film viewed, end of story. I suppose it could be, but this case is far from closed. We are making progress, but the world is not yet in a 12-step program for recovery from growth addiction. . . .

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Blackened Turkey: 3 Alternatives to Black Friday Shopping to Have a Wonderful Life

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

A burned turkey This Thursday many families in the U.S. will observe the Thanksgiving holiday. Some  will push their plates away after a celebratory feast, get up from the table and head out the door to wreck the planet. Most of them won’t be aware of the dire consequences of their shopping sprees.

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. The frenzy of holiday shoppers chasing after bargains dominates the news broadcasts. In recent years it has become extra newsworthy as shoppers have been shot or trampled to death. The sheer absurdity is captured brilliantly in this video from Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff project:

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when we cease to be human beings and become consumers: . . .

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Paul Ehrlich Post-Election Thoughts

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Stanford biologist and longtime sustainability advocate Dr. Paul Ehrlich is in Australia on a research project. He has given me permission to share his thoughts about the recent U.S. election, sent via email late last night, after the presidential election had been called. At GrowthBusters we try to remain apolitical, but of course we admonish political fools when they exhibit growthmania, and we congratulate political leaders when they demonstrate good sense. So, these are Paul Ehrlich’s words. Paul doesn’t hide his disdain for the current GOP, but I think it’s safe to say he’s not thrilled with President Obama’s environmental track record thus far. . . .

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Who Will Get This Economy Moving? No One

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

U.S. President Ballot with Reality an Option “We’ve got to get this economy going again!” Unless your cave lacks wifi, cable or satellite, you’ve heard this once or twice in the last four seconds.

Job creation and economic growth dominate the November election in the U.S. — perhaps more than any election in history. Campaign ads for local, state and national candidates all promise jobs. The presidential election this year has become a referendum on who can breathe new life into our economy.

News Flash: Neither presidential candidate will succeed.

What if our unexamined assumptions about the need and possibility of perpetual economic growth are wrong? What if robust economic growth is our civilization’s way of driving off a cliff? What if the planet is incapable of supporting continued increase in global economic throughput? . . .

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