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

Top 10 Population Films of All Time

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

As we observe World Population Day (July 11) I thought I’d share some of the most interesting films about human population, or least films with significant population themes.

I posted a list of the films I was considering, and invited you to vote for your favorite (or nominate others), so I could rank them by popularity come World Population Day 2013. So here they are, in the order you ranked them. I’m leaving the voting open on this page, so I’ll come back and revise this list if the voting swings significantly.

Be sure to check out www.worldpopulationday.org for other outstanding videos and other population news.

 

#1: GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth (2011)
I directed this documentary challenging the myths linking growth with prosperity and fulfillment. It explores how our beliefs about economic, consumption and population growth prevent rational responses to evidence we’ve outgrown the planet. I’m biased, but this film belongs on the list because of its honesty about overpopulation and exploration of the topic’s taboo. GrowthBusters includes interviews with a host leading thinkers like Paul Ehrlich, William Rees and Herman Daly. It also chronicles my own David vs. Goliath adventures in growthbusting: “My mission is to make it okay to be against growth.”
Available on Pivotshare, Amazon, and direct from producer . . .

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Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

One of the key roots of so many of the challenges and crises we face is remarkably simple to fix, yet for many reasons the solution has evaded us for decades. The root is population, and the simple fix is for every couple around the world to make responsible, informed decisions about family size. Everyone loves their kids and wants them to have a good life. Conceiving a “quiver full” of children in today’s overpopulated world guarantees a life of scarcity, conflict and misery. Choosing to limit the size of your family is the most loving thing you can do for your children. It should be a no-brainer.

We’re counting down to World Population Day on July 11 by sharing our list of Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family. Of course we can easily come up with 20 reasons, but top 20 lists aren’t all the rage. So please follow our daily posts at www.worldpopulationday.org. Here at this blog I’ll also add the newest reason every day, until we have the full list. . . .

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Vote for Top 10 Population Films

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

At GrowthBusters we consider World Population Day (July 11) an annual opportunity to bring the topic of overpopulation into sharper focus. We have some interesting things in store for you this year in the days leading up to World Population Day.

Subscribe to this blog to be kept apprised of our World Population Day posts and activities. Look for the subscribe box to the right of this post.

Also check out www.worldpopulationday.org for outstanding videos and other population news.

This year we thought we’d come up with the ultimate list of the Top Ten Population Films of all time. While I do consider myself the world’s foremost authority on population in the media (not really), I thought it would be fun to invite readers to nominate and vote for films to be on this list. . . .

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Stop and Smell the Environment on World Environment Day

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Typically every morning I rise when the sunlight streams into the room. This time of year that means 6 or even 5:30. I sit down with a cup of skinny cafe mocha and go through my email in-box, which invariably is full of interesting bits of communication from all over the world. Much of it details the ongoing destruction humankind is wringing on the planet.

This morning, however, I received a link to a Youtube video in an email from one of my favorite fans, Nina Centaine. Nina composed (and contributed, for no pay) some of the music in the GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth documentary. You can explore her music here. Knowing Nina is one of the many great rewards of my growthbusting. . . .

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Honey, I Shrunk the Family

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Leatherback On Earth Day many were thinking of ways to be green. Few of us were considering what is probably the greenest behavior of all. My Earth Day contribution was to pass out Endangered Species Condoms at some events over this past weekend. These condoms are a wonderful project of the Center for Biological Diversity, aimed at raising awareness of the role played by human population growth in pushing species off the planet at an alarming rate.

I became an early volunteer in this Center program because I wanted to support any environmental organization that has the courage to tell the truth about overpopulation. Talking about population growth became un-PC in recent decades. At GrowthBusters we are busy changing that. . . .

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