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

Growth Culture Page-Turners

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

People have asked what I’m reading, so I thought I’d spend a few blog posts sharing the titles on my desk, on my kitchen counter, on my coffee table, on the nightstand, and on the floor next to that night stand. Today I will list some novels that explore these issues.

Because of the overwhelming workload of producing GrowthBusters, I have not read any non-fiction for the past several years, so at present I can only recommend these as works exploring the human predicament. I do encourage you to check them out and let me know what you think. I’m sure I’m leaving out some important titles. Please add to this list via the comments below. And look forward in the coming weeks to some lists of incredible non-fiction works. . . .

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Don’t Shop!

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Even if we could, it wouldn’t be in our best interest to consume our way out of recession.

Today is the biggest shopping day of the year, known as Black Friday. Is that something to celebrate? Or is it something we should try to change? In the U.S., the National Retail Federation is expecting a record number of people to shop today – nearly half the entire population. Shopping will be the number one news story today and throughout the weekend. That will be followed by a flurry of news reports about Cyber Monday.

consumerismYet my advice is, “Please don’t shop.” Resist the urge to do your patriotic duty and buy things you and your loved ones don’t really need. Why? It’s rather simple, even though it’s something we rarely think or talk about: The scale of the human enterprise has outgrown the planet. The ecosystems that support our civilization are buckling under the pressure. We are in a global emergency. We need to, as quickly as possible, leave behind us the era of consumption and economic growth. Repeat after me, “I am not a consumer, I am a human being.” . . .

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GrowthBusters Premiere Report

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

I’ve heard from a few of you anxious for a report on the GrowthBusters World Premiere. Apologies for keeping you in suspense. The last four weeks were a whirlwind of activity for me.

First was the presentation and sneak preview of clips at the Center for Environmental Filmmaking on October 25. The next week was our World Premiere in Washington DC on November 2. A week later we held the Colorado Premiere, and then last week was the Bay Area Premiere. This four-week intensive came right on the heels of a Summer/Fall post production binge to finish the film before world population hit 7 billion (31st of October). So finally I am home for a stretch and relearning how to sleep, breathe, relax, exercise and generally have a life. It feels very, very good! . . .

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Network Takes Aim at GrowthBusters, Allows Anti-Contraception Advocate to Mislead

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

The Christian Broadcasting Network took a swipe at GrowthBusters last week – the day before our world premiere. I will admit I hope the release of this film generates increased national and global dialogue about overpopulation. So I’m glad CBN felt called to report on our film. We were even discussed by Pat Robertson (9:00 into this clip) on The 700 Club. Of course not all media outlets go out of their way to present facts objectively. We were not contacted by any CBN reporters or producers to react to the views they presented.

They chose to let Steven Mosher of Population Research Institute refute one of the central premises of the GrowthBusters documentary, that population growth is a threat to the wellbeing of all the children and future generations of the world. Listen to what Mosher had to say:
cbn-report . . .

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Explore New Paths Forward

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Now that you’ve seen the GrowthBusters film, if you’re curious about where we go from here, this is a place to start. Let me begin by assuring you I don’t have all the answers. I just have a lot of the questions. My hope is we can all contribute here our ideas on forging a new, post-growth society.

You might begin by exploring our summary page for each of the four issues addressed in the film:

Economic Growth

Consumption Growth

Population Growth

Urban Growth

Each page can point you to some useful reading. You may also be interested in reviewing our What Can I Do document.

I’d also like to encourage you to explore the website of one of our partners in this, The Pachacuti Project. . . .

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