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  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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 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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior 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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”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’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

ASAP Busting Growth in Virginia

In Support Your Local GrowthBuster I wrote about the need to act locally – precisely because that is how we change the world. Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population are busy doing just that in Charlottesville, Virginia. I spoke with ASAP President Jack Marshall recently for the GrowthBusters podcast on This Is Next Gen.

JackMarshallRadioIntvw

This group of activated citizens is setting the benchmark for raising awareness of a community’s responsibility for its own footprint. I visited Charlottesville last year to shoot a segment for the GrowthBusters documentary. My observation: Charlottesville, like so many communities around the world, has its fair share of growth pushers, addicted to growth. These pushers place profit ahead of sustainability, and they do so by pushing public policies that import more people and export more footprint. . . .

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Top Ten Population Essays

There are smart voices raising awareness of the global challenges presented by population growth. I thought I’d share some of the best. Is this list really the cream of the crop? I invite you to nominate other candidates for this list by commenting below. Listed here are the pieces that have stood out for me – some recently and some over the long term. I’m sure I’m forgetting some exceptional work.

Yesterday brought the official end to Global Population Speak Out, but clearly the chorus needs to keep on singing. I’ve been focusing on the population side of the sustainability equation during the Speak Out, but we need to be raising awareness of other ingredients for our civilization to achieve sustainability. I look forward to once again digging into other topics, like economic growth and consumerism. . . .

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What’s in the Kool-Aid? Worship of Growth Everlasting

GrowthHeadlines
The evidence doesn’t suggest, it shouts, that we have outgrown our planet. Our numbers and our appetites have reached deadly proportions. So why do we still insist on growing our economies? Why are we still adding over 200,000 people per day to the planet? Why is increasing production and consumption a worldwide goal? Part of it is we’ve created a system that requires constant, perpetual growth. But also at play here is a philosophy, our cultural story of why we are here. Growth has become our operating system, society’s version of Microsoft Windows. This is the subject of this week’s GrowthBusters podcast at Next Gen.

One major focus of the upcoming GrowthBusters documentary is to raise awareness of the pro-growth Kool-Aid we are served daily. Today the television, internet, newspaper and radio are a modern-day medicine show. We are barraged with a steady stream of messages telling us growth is the miracle elixir. The language used in headlines, opinion pieces and news stories doesn’t just reveal our society’s bias toward growth as a universal good; it reinforces it. It has programmed us, and now it keeps us hooked on growth. But once we begin to recognize bias in the media anointing growth the cure for every malady, it will begin to lose its power over us. . . .

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Support Your Local GrowthBuster

The topic of overpopulation is getting a lot of focus this month since February is the month for Global Population Speak Out. I have an unusual perspective to share today, but first I want to stress that most sustainable population advocates recognize stabilizing and reducing population only gets us halfway to sustainable equilibrium. We also have to tame the tiger of economic growth and over-consumption. I’ve suggested we need a speak out month for these topics.

My unusual perspective on population is that we need to root out our growth addiction at every level. We cannot have a sustainable world made up of cities, states, territories or nations competing for population growth in order to grow their economies (never mind how utterly stupid the idea). Without accountability for sustainable population size, taming population growth will always be somebody else’s job. In a perfect world we could have open borders and no government involvement in decisions about family size. But in our imperfect world in crisis, we’re going to need – at the very least – to eliminate public policies that accelerate growth. . . .

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Growth-Busting the Kochs in Rancho Mirage

Dave Gardner filming at KochBusters rally

We just finished this brief highlights video of the KochBusters Uncloak the Kochs event in Rancho Mirage. Last weekend billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch held their semiannual “Billionaires Caucus” at a posh resort near Palm Springs, California. These invitation-only meetings have in the past been kept quiet, but details surfaced last Fall when the latest invitation leaked out and was shared by New Yorker magazine and ThinkProgress.

With this information, Common Cause led a coalition of groups who gathered across the street from the secretive Kochs enclave. Groups included California Courage Campaign, California Nurses Association, Greenpeace, CodePink and the Ruckus Society. . . .

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