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  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior 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
  • ”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’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 created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”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 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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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 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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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 just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.”
    – Naomi Klein

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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Ideology of Catastrophe

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

On the plane a few weeks ago I read an opinion piece that begged for this critique. The Ideology of Catastrophe (Wall Street Journal, 10 April, 2012) was written by Pascal Bruckner, who fancies himself a philosopher. He is certainly not a social or physical scientist.

Cartoon: Environmentalists carry signs warning of various catastrophesHis piece attempts to discredit those who warn our civilization of dangers ahead. I’m not sure why, but a good many folks do feel a compulsion to flee the bad news. I’ve come to accept that, and I try not to condemn people just because they can’t handle the truth. But it does get my dander up when such Pollyannas try to drag the rest of civilization down that ignorant path with them. I’m not saying there isn’t a place in the world for optimism and good news. I’m just saying we absolutely must also be realistic and not ignore warning signs. . . .

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Unsustainable Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

“The current human trajectory of growing population and rising consumption is simply not sustainable.   Something has to give.”

I had originally intended to end our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth (the landmark MIT study commissioned by the Club of Rome), on Earth Day. I have so much good material yet to share, and the warnings provided by The Limits to Growth are so important, I’ve decided to extend the series indefinitely. I will now cut back on the frequency of posts to no more than once or twice a week. Incidentally, the Club of Rome is also stepping up the conversation this year about limits. I recommend you explore the Club’s Change the Course website. Today I’m sharing commentary I invited from Robert Walker, president of the Population Institute. Bob is extremely knowledgeable in the population and public policy arenas. His views are published regularly on Huffington Post, and this commentary should also appear there soon.  – Dave Gardner . . .

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Better World Forum Starts Tomorrow

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Imagine sitting in your home office this weekend having a cup of coffee with Deepak Chopra, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bill McKibben, and Joan Blades.

better-world-forum-300x68 That’s just what you can do, thanks to my good friend Steven Zuckerman. Over the next two weekends he’s bringing some of the world’s most innovative thinkers to you – via the Better World Forum.

This forum brings together participants across six continents and over 80 nations around the world, to discuss cutting solutions for unprecedented cultural, economic, environmental and political changes that are happening in our world today.

better-world-forum-reg-box-175x300 Thirty-six sessions will explore topics like enabling human and civil rights, new media engagement, new economic models and creative financing. You can simply listen in, or you can fully engage and participate in discussions following the presentations. . . .

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