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  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”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
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    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 can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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 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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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

Exponential Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

As our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth study (and best-selling book) continues, I thought we should review our progress in the exponential growth demonstration experiment started with this post on March 11 . Please don’t forget to take the Pledge to Think Small, and to join our Worldwide GrowthBusters House Party on Earth Day weekend (April 20-22).

The exponential growth demonstration is very simple, something you should try at home with your family, or at work with your colleagues. It’s guaranteed to stimulate some interesting conversation. It’s based on this story:

In the GrowthBusters film, I share a few moments from retired physics professor Al Bartlett’s world famous lecture about exponential growth: . . .

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Knowing Pachamama

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

I recently attended the Australian premiere of GrowthBusters, thanks to the Stable Population Party of Australia. While down under I had the good fortune to spend time getting to know George Trembath, who wrote the novel, Pachacuti, and organized the Pachacuti Project. Pacha means “the world,” and cuti means “upside down” or “restoring balance.” (Pachacuti was also an Incan emperor about 550 years ago. Pachamama was an Incan fertility goddess, but the term is generally used to mean “Mother Earth.”)

George has been an amazing partner and source of support as I finished and then released the GrowthBusters movie. More about George and Pachacuti in a future post. Today I just want to share this poem from George: . . .

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Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest post in our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary series is courtesy of Tom Murphy. Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He has simultaneously posted this entertaining conversation on his popular blog, Do the Math. More about Tom after the conversation. While there are economists, like Herman Daly, who believe there are limits to economic growth, there are many more, such as the infamous Julian Simon, who do not. That ratio is, I believe, in the process of changing. We hear from both Daly and the late Simon in the GrowthBusters film. It’s pretty entertaining. But I have to hand it to Tom Murphy. He shares with us here an enlightening and engaging conversation with an economist of Simon’s ilk. Enjoy and learn!     – Dave Gardner . . .

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Pollyannas of Population Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest commentary in our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth Study comes from Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Paul is, of course, famous for penning The Population Bomb in 1968. You might be interested to know that his wife, Anne co-wrote the book. She and Paul have written many more books since then, none as famous and Earth-shaking, but all very important and worth reading. I want to thank Paul and Anne for writing this specifically for our Limits to Growth blog series. I’ve encouraged them to share it as well at the web site of an important initiative they support, called the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. GrowthBusters is also a participant in that initiative, and I recommend you explore it. . . .

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I am a Growthbuster

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest post in our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary series is by Andrew Gaines, co-founder of Transform Australia. I spent a wonderful afternoon sitting with Andrew in a coffee shop in Sydney two weeks ago, plotting the salvation of our civilization. Andrew understands and evangelizes about the need for system change. Check out his Whole System Change Ideas Bank. I appreciate this contribution to our series from Andrew and the good work he’s doing. I expect we will collaborate a lot in the future.

I am a Growthbuster

by Andrew Gaines
Transform Australia

I challenge the myth that unlimited growth is both possible and good.

Why? Because the plain fact is that unlimited growth will kill us. . . .

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