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  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – 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
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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

Where is Overpopulation’s Rosie the Riveter?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Here’s installment #3 in our series of questions unanswered during the GrowthBusters webinar, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption. I’m including responses later provided by our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville. Find more information about the panelists, the first 3 questions and links to all these follow-ups here.

8. Terry Spahr asked (in relation to Paul Ehrlich’s remarks about the U.S. uniting on a single mission for WWII: “That was Pearl Harbor. there is no social impetus to go on a consumer war time footing. how do you galvanize a population to go to a wartime footing on reducing consumption?” . . .

Continue Reading 3 Comments

Accusation of Eugenics Persists

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

I’m continuing today to share leftover questions from the GrowthBusters webinar, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption. I’m including responses later provided by our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville. Find more information about the panelists, plus the first 3 questions and answers here.

4. Karen Pitts asked Paul Ehrlich: “Paul Ehrlich, how much money do we need each year to meet the worldwide unmet need for contraception? How much are we spending?”

Paul Ehrlich:  Haven’t time to look up, but it would be a trivial bit of the U.S. arms budget.

 

5. Brian Sanderson asked: “Wouldn’t you also consider poverty as an indicator of overpopulation/overshoot?    Aggressive warfare, also…   Mass migrations, also…” . . .

Continue Reading 6 Comments

Trump Wins headlines

We Just Lost Our Paddle: The Election in the Context of Overpopulation

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Guest Post by Dr. Karen I. Shragg

I write this as a devastated overpopulation activist, social justice activist, and women’s rights activist. I write it as a free-thinking atheist who is not burdened by ancient doctrine. BUT I do not write this from a perspective of shock. I am not surprised by the rise to power of our president elect.  I think it is all pretty predictable in an overpopulated world. A world, by the way, that seems clueless that it is exactly that, overpopulated, overshot, over-baked and way past well done when it comes to using up our planet’s limited and irreplaceable resources.

We may not know intellectually that the US is actually and provably at least 150 million people over its limit to provide resources like water, long term, to our citizens, but I believe we know it in our subconscious. Because so many green groups refuse to tell the carrying capacity story, we are uninformed. We know deep inside that we cannot continue to make promises of prosperity to growing millions when that very prosperity is based on dwindling natural capital. We know that prosperity isn’t just being limited just because people at the top are greedy. It is because there isn’t enough to go around forever and ever. . . .

Continue Reading 20 Comments

Roles of Population and Consumption in Overshoot

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

The second in the GrowthBusters webinar series, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption, went by too quickly. At the end of the hour there were 26 questions we hadn’t had a chance to address. Our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville, were kind enough to provide written responses to these. I will share these here on the GrowthBusters blog over the next several days.

I recommend you subscribe to the blog now to make sure you don’t miss any of these. See the subscription box to the right. Subscribing will also ensure you get notice of the next webinar in the series. While I’ll post nearly every day to get through these questions, normally the blog posts are pretty sparse (subscribing won’t clutter your inbox in 2017). If you’re a GrowthBusters member, you will get webinar invitations regardless. . . .

Continue Reading 5 Comments

Cattle in feedlot, storks carrying babies

Free Webinar to Settle Controversy on Overshoot

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

One of the three podcasts I host is called The Overpopulation Podcast, a project of World Population Balance. One episode this year featured a conversation with author Laura Carroll about making the choice to be childfree. One listener emailed this comment:

“Dear Dave, It’s not population as population is leveling off. It’s consumption, consumption, consumption.”

I’m writing about this today because this is a fairly common occurrence. That’s one of the reasons I’m hosting a free webinar this week:

Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption?

Solving Overpopulation Webinar

I suspect most people think they know the answer to that question. I think I do. So I doubt many will attend hoping to actually find out the answer. I think most who attend will be there to make sure someone doesn’t offer the WRONG answer. Interestingly, there are differing opinions on what the correct answer is. . . .

Continue Reading 9 Comments

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