Miracle Cure for World’s Environmental Problems
I found a great cause that can feed the hungry, reduce poverty, cut CO2 emissions, provide clean water for all, help us survive after peak oil, reduce sprawl, preserve wildlands, eliminate traffic congestion, restore collapsing fisheries and save endangered species. How could there possibly be one solution to all these challenges?
Without a doubt, there is, and it is getting unhooked from Growth Addiction. We put together a unique display for our local community’s Earth Day fair this year. It certainly brought many a curious onlooker to our booth. GrowthBusters volunteers Jason Cross and Bill Jack created this unusual tree. Each leaf trumpeted just one of the many, many environmental causes addressed by our project.
People stopped to ask, “How can you possibly offer solutions to all these problems?” This provided the opportunity to explain (as Jason was doing in this photo) how pursuit of economic growth and failure to stabilize or reduce population is currently erasing most, if not all, the gains we make in addressing today’s environmental issues. Our project, of course, is production of the film, Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity. Its purpose is to help us recognize our addiction, identify the pushers and resist their siren song.
Physicist Al Bartlett summed it up well when he wrote,
“Can you think of any problem, on any scale from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”
Suffice it to say, we gave people some food for thought.
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