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.

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. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .