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

Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest post in our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary series is courtesy of Tom Murphy. Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He has simultaneously posted this entertaining conversation on his popular blog, Do the Math. More about Tom after the conversation. While there are economists, like Herman Daly, who believe there are limits to economic growth, there are many more, such as the infamous Julian Simon, who do not. That ratio is, I believe, in the process of changing. We hear from both Daly and the late Simon in the GrowthBusters film. It’s pretty entertaining. But I have to hand it to Tom Murphy. He shares with us here an enlightening and engaging conversation with an economist of Simon’s ilk. Enjoy and learn!     – Dave Gardner . . .

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Pollyannas of Population Growth

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest commentary in our series honoring the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth Study comes from Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Paul is, of course, famous for penning The Population Bomb in 1968. You might be interested to know that his wife, Anne co-wrote the book. She and Paul have written many more books since then, none as famous and Earth-shaking, but all very important and worth reading. I want to thank Paul and Anne for writing this specifically for our Limits to Growth blog series. I’ve encouraged them to share it as well at the web site of an important initiative they support, called the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. GrowthBusters is also a participant in that initiative, and I recommend you explore it. . . .

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I am a Growthbuster

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Today’s guest post in our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary series is by Andrew Gaines, co-founder of Transform Australia. I spent a wonderful afternoon sitting with Andrew in a coffee shop in Sydney two weeks ago, plotting the salvation of our civilization. Andrew understands and evangelizes about the need for system change. Check out his Whole System Change Ideas Bank. I appreciate this contribution to our series from Andrew and the good work he’s doing. I expect we will collaborate a lot in the future.

I am a Growthbuster

by Andrew Gaines
Transform Australia

I challenge the myth that unlimited growth is both possible and good.

Why? Because the plain fact is that unlimited growth will kill us. . . .

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Birthing the New Economy

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Our series honoring the 40th anniversary of the Limits to Growth study continues. Today, a guest post from Rick Heller. Through www.seeingtheroses.org, Rick is helping us recognize the joys of getting unhooked from our unsustainable, growth-addicted ways. Today he offers a report on the Transition to a New Economy conference.

LTG-Experiment_day101 First, let’s pick up our exponential growth demonstration. If you’ll recall, we began with a single grain of wheat in a beaker. Each day of the demonstration, we double the amount of wheat in the beaker. This is equivalent to a growth rate of just under 3% per hour. This makes it a good fast-track demonstration of what’s happening in the real world. 3% annual growth is a common economic objective. About 15 nations have annual population growth rates near or above 3%. Las Vegas, Nevada was growing faster than 3% annually until the housing bubble burst. Last week we left off at Day Nine, with 256 grains of wheat. Today let’s double that: . . .

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Join the Worldwide GrowthBusters House Party

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

5oo GrowthBusters Screenings Earth Day Weekend

If you’re subscribed to this blog, the daily posts will continue for just 3 more weeks – until Earth Day on April 22. As Earth Day approaches this year, I sense growing awareness that we are fast approaching Al Bartlett’s one minute before 12, and a sense that it’s time for a re-awakening. Turning off the lights for Earth Hour or pledging on Earth Day to change over to fluorescent light bulbs or hang the laundry out to dry is not enough. We need a society-wide paradigm shift – away from the expectation of MORE, year after year.

Catalyzing that shift is the purpose of my documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. The film was intended to shake our blind faith in the benefits and possibility of everlasting growth. So if you want to do more this Earth Day, in addition to taking our Pledge to Think Small, I ask you to host a screening of GrowthBusters. The more people who see the film, the more are prepared to embrace the end of growth. It may not instantly convert all viewers, but it will at least plant a seed of doubt about the feasibility of a system hooked on growth. . . .

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