Our series honoring the 40th anniversary of the Limits to Growth study continues. Today, a guest post from Rick Heller. Through www.seeingtheroses.org, Rick is helping us recognize the joys of getting unhooked from our unsustainable, growth-addicted ways. Today he offers a report on the Transition to a New Economy conference.

First, let’s pick up our exponential growth demonstration. If you’ll recall, we began with a single grain of wheat in a beaker. Each day of the demonstration, we double the amount of wheat in the beaker. This is equivalent to a growth rate of just under 3% per hour. This makes it a good fast-track demonstration of what’s happening in the real world. 3% annual growth is a common economic objective. About 15 nations have annual population growth rates near or above 3%. Las Vegas, Nevada was growing faster than 3% annually until the housing bubble burst. Last week we left off at Day Nine, with 256 grains of wheat. Today let’s double that: . . .

5oo GrowthBusters Screenings Earth Day Weekend

If you’re subscribed to this blog, the daily posts will continue for just 3 more weeks – until Earth Day on April 22. As Earth Day approaches this year, I sense growing awareness that we are fast approaching Al Bartlett’s one minute before 12, and a sense that it’s time for a re-awakening. Turning off the lights for Earth Hour or pledging on Earth Day to change over to fluorescent light bulbs or hang the laundry out to dry is not enough. We need a society-wide paradigm shift – away from the expectation of MORE, year after year.

Catalyzing that shift is the purpose of my documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. The film was intended to shake our blind faith in the benefits and possibility of everlasting growth. So if you want to do more this Earth Day, in addition to taking our Pledge to Think Small, I ask you to host a screening of GrowthBusters. The more people who see the film, the more are prepared to embrace the end of growth. It may not instantly convert all viewers, but it will at least plant a seed of doubt about the feasibility of a system hooked on growth. . . .

One prominent public figure was able to match Reagan’s hopefulness and ability to inspire. She was a humble writer and farmer, but first and foremost, she was a scientist who rooted her analyses in the laws of physics and ecology (she certainly never tried to gain support by resorting to fantasy-land notions such as infinite growth on a finite planet).

Last night, with the lights out during Earth Hour, I had an epiphany. It hit me: “Wow, it’s pretty dark.”

So I took advantage of that darkness to step outside of the rational, logical thought processes I discovered have been limiting me. I realized the only thing that limits humankind is limited thinking.

For 6 years I researched and produced a film questioning our worship of growth everlasting. GrowthBusters was released in November and is today enjoying film festival and other screenings around the world. So you can imagine the shock of realizing I was completely wrong when I bought – hook, line and sinker – the silly notions advanced by such crackpot scientists as Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb), misguided sociologists as William Catton (Overshoot), rogue economists like Herman Daly (Ecological Economics), and the group of MIT scientists who (imagine the folly) used computer models to reach their conclusions in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study. . . .

I encourage you to join millions of people around the world tonight in observing Earth Hour. From 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. turn off all your lights and unnecessary electrical devices, in a gesture acknowledging you understand and will continue to do something about the urgent need to, individually and collectively, reduce our use of fossil fuels.

Ostensibly this is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the climate disruption they cause. Even if this weren’t the case, I would suggest it’s important we acknowledge there is a finite supply of these fuels on the planet, and we have no right to burn through most of it in 300 years, leaving none for the use of future generations. That kind of thinking is relatively new to us, but it’s the type of thinking we must do now that we’ve filled the planet with 7 billion of us. This intergenerational golden rule is one of the bases of my quest for our civilization to achieve sustainability. . . .