Fundraising Soundtrack Now Available    Buy It Here

I want to honor musicians who’ve devoted their artistry to finding the cure for growth addiction and those who have offered to help the GrowthBusters documentary film project. To do that we decided to publish a “soundtrack” album for Earth Day, featuring music inspiring or inspired by our film. Some, but not all, of this music will undoubtedly find its way into the film.

One tune that undoubtedly will be in the film is the new GrowthBusters Theme. Order this album and you’ll be among the very first to hear it in its entirety. I woke up this morning with it bouncing around in my head!

Proceeds from the sale of this album will help fund completion of the film. Every artist represented has graciously contributed his/her work to this fundraiser. . . .

I was recently interviewed by Modern Hippie Mag. Founder and editor Jaszy McAllister has become a fan of the GrowthBusters film project. You can listen to the interview here on Modern Hippie Radio.

Jaszy founded Modern Hippie Mag to “share a love for all things ‘green’, conscious living, and sustainability.” That was enough to get my interest. I’ve been following Modern Hippie for several months now and have gained some useful information to help me reduce my impact at home.

Modern Hippie has a variety of talented writers, publishes daily and weekly newsletters, shares interviews on Modern Hippie Radio, and provides video updates on Modern Hippie TV. . . .

The newest GrowthBusters podcast is available now on NextGen. Thanks to NextGen’s Steve Zuckerman for making this soap box available to me. I encourage you to check out the thoughtful, outside-the-box programming at NextGen.

This week’s podcast is the audio version of a blog I posted last week about pro-growth propaganda found in my hometown newspaper. If you’d rather listen than read, then here’s your chance. I will ocassionally do a podcast and/or blog post highlighting such examples of growth-worship programming in the media. I am certain that as more and more of us become aware of what’s in the Kool-Aid we are served, the power of that propaganda will diminish. Good listening… . . .

It’s my mission to point out the programming that keeps our culture speeding toward a cliff, fueled by its destructive addiction to MORE. My radar is finely tuned to pick up not just themes and premises, but even the subtleties of word selection that reinforce our society’s belief that bigger is better. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Ocassionally I get a little cranky that so many cannot yet see what I call “growthism” in news reports, headlines, editorials and even television commercials. I get even crankier toward those who keep creating and serving this Kool-Aid.

I try to be diplomatic when drawing attention to examples of growthism Kool-Aid. After all, most who drink it – and many who serve it – are blissfully unaware of its toxic ingredients. They don’t realize we are members of a cult – the cult of growth, and when we swallow the Kool-Aid we are making a suicide pact. Forgive me for being tough on my hometown newspaper today. This is going to be a cranky moment. . . .

In making a film about becoming a sustainable civilization, it is far too easy to focus on the big picture – the changes needed in our consumptive, growth-worshipping system – and ignore individual behavior. I am certainly guilty of excusing, say, a filming trip by airplane to Toronto or Los Angeles, as a worthwhile environmental sacrifice. If the GrowthBusters film helps our society get unhooked from its growth addiction, the oil consumption and carbon emissions of that flight will have been worth it.

Perhaps true, but this fascinating piece (Flying Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do for the Environment — So Why Do So Many Well-Intentioned Folks Do It?) on AlterNet raises some salient points about how many of us make decisions like this every day. This article points out that those of us who are hanging our clothes on the line, riding our bikes or walking, and eschewing paper napkins, etc. are among the first to hop on a jet for a trip to an activist gathering in D.C. or Cancun or Copenhagen. I think we have to change, and in fact I am working on that. A year ago I spent 24 days on the U.S. East Coast shooting interviews and b-roll in order to do that shooting with just one round-trip by air. I’ve enlisted the help of filmmakers and journalists in London, Delhi, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Sydney so I could avoid trans-ocean flights (working on a shoestring budget made it that much easier to do the right footprint-minimizing thing). . . .