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  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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 just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”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
  • ”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’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
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken

Is the Public Ready to Consider Carbon Footprint in Family-Size Decisions?

This question is finally on the table here at GrowthBusters, as I’ve observed mainstream media finally giving ink and airtime to the heavy environmental impact of each additional child brought into the world. Why is that?

One reason is that scientists have now documented choosing to conceive just one fewer child will reduce your carbon footprint a LOT more than any other “green” action. You’ll find that study VERY interesting. It’s bottom line: “until the emissions associated with desired services are reduced to zero, population will continue to be a multiplier of emissions.” Multiplier is the key word here.

That ought to be a “duh” statement, but – until recently – overpopulation was rarely mentioned, and DOING something to ease human population back to a wise and sustainable level was never mentioned in the scientific reports or news coverage of climate change. But that is finally changing. . . .

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Mother and baby: If you love children, don't have any more

If You Love Kids – Don’t Have Any More

July 11 is World Population Day. We recently passed 7.6 billion humans alive on the planet, while scientists’ best estimates place sustainable world population at about 2 billion. This is an important occasion to have a conversation about our procreative choices.

Isn’t it time for the recommendation to go out far and wide that young couples should choose to have no children, or at most one child, until world population coasts back down to a sustainable level? The connection between family size decisions, climate change and carbon footprint has been getting more and more press, so we at GrowthBusters wondered if the time had finally come.

Is the public ready to acknowledge we have a moral responsibility to have fewer children? . . .

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Great Transition webinar

Webinar June 14: Great Transition Initiative

Learn about an exciting paradigm-shifting initiative at the next free GrowthBusters webinar.

Please join me for an engaging conversation about how we can catalyze the needed paradigm shift to a life-sustaining society. You’re invited to join this GrowthBusters webinar at no cost.

I’ve invited Andrew Gaines of the Great Transition Initiative to tell us more about the project. It’s gearing up to help catalyze the system change we need in order for human civilization to stick around on planet Earth awhile longer.

Date and Time: Wednesday, June 14 at 9pm EDT. Register Here

Registrants receive a link to view a replay in case they cannot attend live. The webinar will last one hour and 15 minutes.

On the webinar we’ll pick Andrew’s brain and explore how he thinks we can align to solve the major bottlenecks challenging our transition to a sustainable society. How can we go past ‘preaching to the converted’ and bring a critical mass of the general public into considering the consequences of big picture trends such as ever-growing global economy and population, global warming, and peak everything? . . .

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Webinar: Joy of a Steady State Economy

REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR

Did you know our relentless pursuit of robust economic growth is liquidating the planet of vital resources much faster than it can regenerate them? We are “burning down the house to keep warm.” There is another way.

If this idea intrigues you, please join us for an enlightening conversation February 15, 2017 with Brian Czech, author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train and Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads. Brian is president of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, and he’ll explain the need for, and benefits of, a steady state economy.

Webinar: Joy of a Steady State EconomyBrian is a conservation biologist who taught ecological economics for over a decade at Virginia Tech. He is frequently invited to speak to groups and writes for Huffington Post and the Daly News. I love his sense of humor and way with words. Registration for this webinar entitles you to participate both in the February 15 session and a more advanced followup webinar on February 22. Both webinars begin at 9 pm U.S. Eastern Time and last one hour and 15 minutes. Registrants will receive a link to view a replay of the webinar. . . .

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Solving Overpopulation Webinar

Reduce Immigration and Go Vegan?

Here’s the 7th and final installment of questions from our Solving Overshoot webinar. I’m sharing the questions we didn’t have time to address, and I’m including comments received from Madeleine Somerville and Paul Ehrlich, our panelists. If you missed the first few installments, start here with installment one. Your comments are welcome below. I’ve jumped in and offered some of my own thoughts because of the importance and relevance of these. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

 

24. Libby Sharpe asked: “I hate to be the one to raise the immigration question, but any thoughts about that? I am compassionate toward immigrants, but it seems to me that unfettered immigration just disseminates populations without lowering birthrates, as much of the immigrations is from countries where there is high selective pressure for increased birth rates.” . . .

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