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  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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

Al Bartlett Week – In Remembrance

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

A Week-Long Marathon of All Things Al Bartlett

Al Bartlett left this Earth on September 7, 2013. If you had asked him, I’m afraid he would have said he didn’t leave it better than he found it. Still, Al made a big difference in this world.

BartlettWeek In the Fall of 2005 I filmed the very first interview for my documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. I sat down with Al Bartlett, professor emeritus of physics, in a cluttered office the size of a janitor’s closet, and began a conversation I never wanted to end. He must have had another appointment, because 78 questions later I was trudging back across the University of Colorado campus with my video gear slung across shoulders and back.

The minute I acquired my first high-definition video camera, specifically to film GrowthBusters, my first act was to schedule that interview. Al Bartlett was no spring chicken, and it would be a crime if I didn’t get that interview because I dawdled. He turned out to be amazingly resilient, and lived another 9 years. I was lucky and honored to count him as a colleague in the true sustainability movement for that time. I dedicated the GrowthBusters documentary to the great physics professor with a knack for hitting the nail on the head . . .

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A GrowthBuster’s Work is Never Done

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today we announced to the world a crowdfunding campaign for our new TV series (in development), Conversation Earth. If you support our GrowthBusters work, you’ll want to help us meet and exceed the modest $15,000 goal.

Why a TV series? An opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times purported humans are above nature. It claimed our technology can overcome any limitations we might create by paving over habitat, overfishing, damming rivers, pumping aquifers dry and overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. (read my full critique at www.growthbiasbusted.org)

It’s astonishing we have scientists (granted, it’s a minority of them) writing this kind of nonsense, and disappointing a prestigious, widely read newspaper publishes it. This reminds us we still have very important work to do, replacing the growth mythology that’s paralyzing society as we steer our civilization straight toward the cliff. . . .

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Planetary Overload: Faked Out by the Holy Grail of Economic Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Earth Overshoot Day 2013Today (August 20) is Earth Overshoot Day, according to scientists at Global Footprint Network. That means in about eight months we’ve consumed the renewable resources the Earth takes a year to replenish. If we want to live sustainably and leave our children a world worth inheriting, we need to turn off the lights, stop eating, drinking, driving, flying, and shopping – and hold our breath for the rest of the year – to make up for our unsustainable rate of resource use.

WWF’s Living Planet Report tells us we’re using 50% more resources each year than the Earth can replenish. That’s why we’re seeing climate disruption, fisheries collapsing, aquifer and river levels dropping, fertile soil declining and deserts expanding. In the U.S. we’re actually using resources at five times the sustainable rate. Overshoot Day for the U.S. was back in March! . . .

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Your Prediction of Earth Overshoot Day

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

In 1980 William Catton published a book titled Overshoot, which outlined how the scale of the human enterprise had outgrown our planet. Every year scientists at the Global Footprint Network calculate the day humanity crosses into overshoot for that year. They’ve dubbed it Earth Overshoot Day, and it’s coming up. I’m inviting you at the end of this post to predict when that day will fall this year.

What, exactly, is overshoot? It’s a critical concept to understand, because it is directly related to the concept of sustainability and the ability of humankind to stick around.

A simple way to explain overshoot is analogizing Earth’s resources and ecosystems to your savings account at the bank. In Earth’s case, we don’t get to make new deposits into our natural capital account. We have to make good use of what is on the planet. Just as your savings account earns interest, Earth’s resources are replenished. Acorns fall and new trees grow. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and put oxygen back into the atmosphere. Fish reproduce. . . .

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Should We Stop Worrying and Love the (Population) Bomb?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today is World Population Day, observed in many ways around the world. Every year at this time I survey the landscape and assess our progress toward achieving a sustainable world population.

There is good news and bad. Overall I think progress is being made on my goal of getting overpopulation onto our radar screens. More about that below.

First I want to highlight the efforts of the GrowthBusters project to have more awareness and information about the subject:

1. Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family

2. Top 10 Population Films of All Time

3. Our new video, Should We Stop Worrying and Love the (Population) Bomb:

Next, the bad news. Here are the things that are bugging me today about the world population situation: . . .

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