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

Getting Along With the End of Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Okay, I get that we are at the end of growth. What should I do with that information?

Yesterday I had a nice conversation on the air with the hosts of  Spread Peace Radio. You can hear our discussion here (the 1/19/13 episode), which was wide-ranging, but did touch on what we can or should be doing to embrace the end of growth.

Enjoy Life! While it is challenging to get past our addiction to growth, living sustainably doesn’t mean a dismal, uncomfortable existence. In fact, it frees us to enjoy the good things in life!

There wasn’t time to fully explore that subject, so I promised the listeners I’d blog about it today. If you came to the blog after listening to that show, welcome. I hope you’ll subscribe to the blog (right side of this page) and I invite you to participate in the conversation by adding your comments below. This to-do list is not comprehensive, so I hope you’ll add your suggestions here. . . .

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GrowthBusters Named Best Film at 33rd Annual Global Media Awards

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Last night I gratefully accepted a Global Media Award for best film or miniseries for my film, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. The Global Media Awards are presented annually by the Population Institute to recognize significant contribution to public discussion and understanding of issues related to population growth. I’m thrilled the film is getting this recognition, alongside such honors as being selected to screen at 11 film festivals so far. (Click on photos below to enlarge.)

Bob Walker, Bill Ryerson and Dave Gardner We had some fun as I thanked two of the smartest sustainable population advocates/experts I know, Population Institute Chair Bill Ryerson and President Bob Walker, for our award. I presented each with a GrowthBusters movie poster. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, we had replaced me as the lead growthbuster on the posters with Bill and Bob. . . .

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Climate disruption not the whole story of our sad predicament

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

We risk a global collapse of our civilization as we know it. Climate change is just one of our problems. We cannot avert calamity without tackling it and other pressing ecological concerns in concert.

Ehrlich perspective in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
For DailyClimate.org

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a press conference was held at the National Press Club with the goal of trying to inject environmental issues into the debates. It failed miserably, but it was also informative because every question asked by a reporter was about global warming. . . .

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I Want to Give You a Film Crew T-Shirt

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Film Crew T-Shirt Contest

Help us choose the GrowthBusters Film Crew T-shirt you will soon be wearing!
(click on a photo to enlarge it) 

Film Crew T: I ain't afraid of NO growth! Vote For Image 3 votes

I’d like to send you a Film Crew T-shirt, but you do have to be on the crew to get it. The good news is that when you make a donation (tax-deductible in the U.S.) to the project you are actually joining our team, becoming a GrowthBuster, and – if you donate $100 or more, we’ll thank you by sending a T-shirt.

Film Crew T: We're addicted to growth! Vote For Image 4 votes

Problem is, we can’t decide which design is the best. Please help us decide, by voting for the one you want to wear. We also welcome your suggestions for other slogans or designs. Post your design or slogan to our facebook page, comment below with your suggestion, or send me an email. We’ll add your design to the ballot. We’ll produce a batch of the design that wins the most votes, and the winning designer will get an extra T-shirt free. . . .

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Help Us Eliminate Unsustainable Pro-Growth Media Bias

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

X-ray showing your brain on growth mania Please help us eliminate pro-growth bias in the news media. A flurry of news reports this morning reinforce the cultural myth that population growth is a sign things are going well. This keeps our culture hooked on growth. Over a lifetime it programs us to seek and celebrate growth.

The U.S. Census released new state population estimates yesterday, and – as usual – the flurry of news headlines and reports is providing disappointing evidence that most journalists have a pro-growth bias. It’s often fairly subtle, but if your radar for this bias is active as you read some of these headlines or stories, you can’t miss it.

 

This is a real problem in our modern culture, because it reinforces the cultural myth that growth is necessary for prosperity. We must give this myth a decent burial to speed our transition to a sustainable world. This will be a world that does not seek impossible and destructive perpetual growth, but rather seeks good and satisfying lives that leave future generations a world worth inheriting. . . .

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