This Friday, the 28th of November, is Black Friday, what’s become a national holiday celebrating consumption. As much of the rest of the world strives to emulate the over-consuming ways of the U.S., the Black Friday shopping tradition is spreading around the world. Especially in the U.S., all eyes are on how much money shoppers spend on the day after Thanksgiving (and even on the eve of Thanksgiving now, as retailers try to wring every penny they can from our wallets). If we “consumers” don’t spend more this year than last, it’s considered a failure.

Last year I wrote a thorough essay about all that’s wrong with this tradition; there’s no sense repeating it. Read it for yourself. You may want to share it with your shop-a-holic friends. . . .

Voters in Malibu, California are deciding in tomorrow’s election whether to wrest control over the quality of their community from a system that has been failing them. While this kind of battle is near and dear to my heart as a GrowthBuster, I might not have learned about it were it not for the star power involved in the struggle. The photo below is from this New York Times story.

The star power is not the main story here, but it does have some relevance I’ll get into. In one corner we have Rob Reiner, a talented and very well known film director (The Bucket List, A Few Good Men, When Harry Met Sally, and This is Spinal Tap are but a few of his gems), who also has a long string of acting and producing credits. In the battle his support team includes Dick Van Dyke, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, James L. Brooks and Jeffrey Katzenberg. In the other corner we have…a real estate developer, and the Malibu “establishment.” . . .

Too few environmentalists and sustainability advocates are willing to eschew political correctness and put “smart growth” into the unsustainable dung heap in which it belongs, right next to “dumb growth.” Too few scientists have been willing to take respected journals and magazines to task for engaging in a conspiracy of “silent lies,” leaving overpopulation unmentioned in discussions of various crises. You could never accuse notable physicist Al Bartlett of beating around the bush or tap-dancing around the clear truths about the unsustainability of growth.

Two years ago today, the celebrated professor passed away, at the age of 90, succumbing to a second battle with cancer. I was lucky enough to visit Al’s bedside a month earlier. He was in good spirits, with a lot of his mental spunk intact. . . .

Two months ago today, South Park producer/animation director Eric Stough –addressing the 2014 graduating class at University of Colorado – offered some life-saving advice (at 13:48 in this video):

“In less than two hours you’ll walk through those gates with your hard earned diploma and it’s time to think about work, getting a job, climbing the corporate ladder, looking forward to raises, maybe buying a house with a partner and having a baby or two, and for Earth’s sake keep it to two.”

– Eric Stough, Producer/Animation Director of South Park

My stepdaughter Katie was in the crowd watching her boyfriend Connor graduate. She texted me about Stough’s advice. She knew I’d be excited. Yes, I have a one-track mind, focused on the sustainability of (what must become) an elegant human civilization. Yes, I make films and speak frequently about the overpopulated state of our planet. And, yes, it’s news when someone famous backs me up on this. In all fairness, a few of the rich and famous have spoken up about overpopulation – Jane Fonda, Richard Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Ted Turner, Australian millionaire Dick Smith, Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Einstein, Cameron Diaz, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama. But that’s too few. . . .

As we approach World Population Day 2014 (July 11), it’s well past time we seriously consider the role of human population level in the sustainability of our civilization.

Over the last century the scale of the human enterprise has mushroomed, eventually surpassing the capacity of the Earth to sustainably support us. Scientists at the Global Footprint Network estimate we crossed that threshold about 40 years ago. Every year we get an update from WWF revealing how far into overshoot we have ventured.

The path we’ve taken closely mirrors a scenario run by a group of scientists at MIT that shows our life-support systems failing this century, under the heavy load of human activity. Evidence of overshoot, while seldom characterized as such, is in the news every day. . . .