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

The Titanic Code

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

One hundred years ago April 15, the Titanic disappeared beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Several have marked this anniversary by noting the similarities between the Titanic and human civilization. In Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron, on the National Geographic channel, James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film, Titanic, aptly turned the event into metaphor:

“Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now.”  He continues, “We can’t turn because of the momentum of the system, the political momentum, the business momentum.”* . . .

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Think Small Pledge a Bust?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

For a month now I’ve been urging people to take our Pledge to Think Small. And I’ve been asking supporters to spread the word and encourage others to take it. I’ve been stupefied by the response. A measly 177 pledgers so far. That is very disappointing. No one likes to admit defeat, and all my corporate spin experience over the years tells me not to be honest about this failure.

In order to be effective, however, I’ve got to be authentic and honest. So today I will lay my soul bare and admit – at least so far – that the Pledge to Think Small is a big bust. I’m not giving up. I still think it’s a good idea. But I’m open to learning from my mistakes. . . .

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GrowthBusters Hits New York

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Sunshine_opening-246x300 Greetings from New York City, where GrowthBusters hits the big screen this Thursday. Yesterday was the first day of the SOHO International Film Festival, and it was quite exciting to meet other filmmakers, just as committed to their vision as I am to mine. Get your tickets now to see the New York City premiere of GrowthBusters at 3:30 Thursday.

The theater was packed last night for the screening of The Night Never Sleeps. This is a narrative cop film with Eric Roberts and Armand Assante in supporting roles, made on a shoestring, and quite engaging. The bad guy, played by Russ Carmada, was one of the all-time greats. You really wanted this guy to get his due. My compliments to Fred Carpenter and Russ Carmada for pulling this off. . . .

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Titanic – What Keeps Us From Turning the Ship?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

titaniccolor2-300x218 Saturday, 14 April, marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. This happened late in the night. A few hours later, on the 15th of April, the unsinkable behemoth went down. The GrowthBusters project is proud to partner with the Club of Rome in using this anniversary to inspire our civilization to change course.

Like the Titanic, we think we are indomitable and unsinkable. So even now, as we’ve faced a growing plethora of evidence we’ve outgrown the planet, it’s full-speed ahead.

We’re busy rearranging the deck chairs, ever certain there is nothing wrong with our compass heading. We ought to be abandoning our pursuit of perpetual economic growth and our fear of strongly advocating an early end to population growth. Instead we campaign to distribute wealth more equitably, avoid fracking in our backyard, stop an oil pipeline, or end suburban sprawl. Deck chairs. . . .

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Exponential Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

As our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth study (and best-selling book) continues, I thought we should review our progress in the exponential growth demonstration experiment started with this post on March 11 . Please don’t forget to take the Pledge to Think Small, and to join our Worldwide GrowthBusters House Party on Earth Day weekend (April 20-22).

The exponential growth demonstration is very simple, something you should try at home with your family, or at work with your colleagues. It’s guaranteed to stimulate some interesting conversation. It’s based on this story:

In the GrowthBusters film, I share a few moments from retired physics professor Al Bartlett’s world famous lecture about exponential growth: . . .

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