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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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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 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 can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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 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
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist

New Book – 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Jorgen Randers is an optimist. When I met him in Washington DC in March at a Limits to Growth symposium hosted by the Smithsonian and the Club of Rome, I found him to be a delightful, cheerful man. Yet he has given up on humankind. The biggest take-away from his new book, the latest decadal Limits to Growth update, is that short-term thinking will continue to trump the long-term welfare of the planet, and of the future generations who will depend on it.

2052_cover But 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years is  far from a depressing doomsday read. In fact, based on my own worldview, informed by a decade of researching and monitoring our modern culture’s obsession with growth, Randers paints a far rosier picture of our future than I’m afraid we’ll see. . . .

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The Magic of Mountainfilm

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

A few days after last November’s world premiere of GrowthBusters, the program director of Mountainfilm in Telluride asked to see the film. Mountainfilm was planning a daylong symposium on population in conjunction with its annual film festival on Memorial Day weekend, and Paul Ehrlich was urging Emily to screen GrowthBusters at the festival. It seemed like a perfect fit.

In April I was heartbroken to learn GrowthBusters was not on the agenda. Just one film expressly about population was scheduled – a brand new film called Critical Mass. While I was bummed about GrowthBusters being passed over, I was still glad to see the subject addressed at the festival. I felt it was important to support this, and of course was very interested in seeing Critical Mass and attending the Moving Mountains Symposium about population. So I swallowed my pride and made plans to attend. . . .

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Needed: Paradigm Shift

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

It would have been nice for me to share today’s guest post with you on Earth Day, as that occasion drove some of these comments. However, maybe it’s even more appropriate today, almost 3 weeks after Earth Day 2012. Did we change the world on April 22? Did you change your life?

Earth Day 2012: What are We Celebrating?

by Ghassan Karam

Many in the world are already celebrating the 42 anniversary of Earth Day and that is understandable. The young idealists who started this movement had a dream, a dream that the citizens of this planet have grown up, opened their eyes and decided that the human species must change its behavior , in all fields, if the planet and all what is on it is to have a chance to sustain its existence and to thrive. Over forty years have passed and the dream is farther away than ever. Actually it is not an exaggeration to claim that the dream is currently out of reach and that the human species has managed to create the conditions that will lead to nothing short of a ruinous outcome. Yes we are beyond the tipping point and in the words of the great James Lovelock we are witnessing “Gaia’s Revenge”. . . .

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Working Upstream

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Karen Shragg is a naturalist in Minneapolis I’ve come to know through World Population Balance. Karen is a sustainable population advocate and is a very active member of WPB’s board of advisors. I might mention I am a huge fan of the work being done by World Population Balance. Explore the organization’s website. Don’t stop here, but do check out it’s Frequently Asked Questions. Very well put together. It would be an understatement to say Karen is passionate about this subject. I invited her to participate in our continuing series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth, and I’m pleased to share what she wrote. It is so significant I feel I should add my two cents, but she covers it quite eloquently and I will leave it to her. . . .

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Demolishing the Decoupling Myth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

While down under for the Australian theatrical premiere of GrowthBusters, I had the good fortune to spend several hours sitting on the porch of George Trembath’s home near Maleny, sipping tea and coffee and having a deep conversation with George (of Pachacuti Project) and ecological economist Richard Sanders. I jokingly called it the Maleny Summit. I invited Richard to share some thoughts with us for my blog series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth.

maleny-summit-caption-300x225 I’m glad Richard chose to write about “decoupling.” We cling so tenaciously to our dogma of everlasting growth that we dream up fairy tales to explain how we can overcome physical limits. One common tale is the idea that economic growth can occur without increasing extraction of natural resources and emission of waste. This notion is called decoupling: economic growth is decoupled from growth in natural resource consumption. Some degree of decoupling has been occurring as our economy emphasizes services over manufacturing, and as we increase efficiency. It’s been happening at a very slow rate, however. . . .

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