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  • ”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 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
  • ”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
  • ”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’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.”
    – 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
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”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 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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”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 created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”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 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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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’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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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

Population Taboo – Kiss it Adieu!

Today marks the beginning of Global Population Speak Out.

It’s human nature to blend in with the crowd. Nobody wants to be the only one with a given viewpoint. The cultural taboo on discussing overpopulation renders politicians, scientists and other opinion leaders reluctant to mention population when discussing both causes and solutions of modern challenges. Famed physicist Al Bartlett (author of the ultra-logical Laws Relating to Sustainability) nicely summed up his frustration about this in the Spring 2008 Teachers Clearinghouse for Science and Society Education Newsletter: Why Have Scientists Succumbed To Political Correctness? (Incidentally, my film, Hooked on Growth, is dedicated to Professor Bartlett.) . . .

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Colorado Water: Working on the Wrong Problem!

Recently I was unable to attend and film an important public meeting about future water supply planning for Colorado. Glen Colton was able to attend, and offered this incisive commentary about Colorado water planning. Glen points out some deficiencies in thinking that can apply to numerous resources in many parts of the world, so Glen agreed to be our guest blogger on this topic.

Glen’s Commentary:

I recently attended a meeting in Loveland, Colorado discussing the South Platte Basin water report (Water for the 21st Century).  There were about 150 – 200 people in attendance, many of them elected officials, water district people, municipal water people, developers, and others with a stake in getting more water for their towns  There were also a smattering of other folks including a few environmentalists and several people from Trout Unlimited that I knew. . . .

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What Copenhagen Demonstrators Want You to Know

What was the message of the demonstrators in Copenhagen? Some groups, such as Bill McKibben’s 350.org, were pushing for nations to agree to ambitious goals to get carbon dioxide levels down to 350 ppm. According to environmental journalist Zoe Cormier, many were trying to get the word out that we cannot get CO2 levels down as long as we remain hooked on growth – clinging to a system that doesn’t know the meaning of the word enough.

Zoe, the brains behind www.AxisOfEco.com was the eyes and ears of the GrowthBusters project during last month’s climate talks. My apologies for only now posting her final report, taped on December 23. My schedule; my bad. Her analysis, however, is both good and timeless. . . .

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Growth Begins at Home

In my film, Hooked on Growth, I’m charting fairly unoccupied territory in linking the growth-addictive behavior of cities with global unsustainability. Sure, some cities are making efforts to reduce their carbon or overall ecological footprint, but most expectations of sustainable behavior focus either on individual behavior or national policy. Discussions of overpopulation, for example, tend to deal with either the global total or the couple’s decisions about family size – and nothing in-between. There is some discussion of national population policy (frequently discussion is as far as it ever gets), and almost no discussion of sustainable population size for cities. . . .

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GrowthBusters Team in Full Swing

As we enter the homestretch to complete the GrowthBusters documentary, I’m going to offer more frequent updates and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the production process. This week we’ve been joined in the office by assistant editor and production associate Lynsey Jones. Lynsey left home in Oakland, California to spend a month at what we lovingly call “GrowthBusters World Headquarters.” She’s been pitching in virtually for the past few months, helping us obtain important historical film clips. She arrived here in a snowstorm while the temperature was on it’s way down to -2 degrees Fahrenheit (-19°C). We hope she won’t get homesick! . . .

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