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  • ”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
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”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 created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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 is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”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
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”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
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”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’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
  • ”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 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 Was Wrong – There are NO Limits to Growth!

Last night, with the lights out during Earth Hour, I had an epiphany. It hit me: “Wow, it’s pretty dark.”

So I took advantage of that darkness to step outside of the rational, logical thought processes I discovered have been limiting me. I realized the only thing that limits humankind is limited thinking.

For 6 years I researched and produced a film questioning our worship of growth everlasting. GrowthBusters was released in November and is today enjoying film festival and other screenings around the world. So you can imagine the shock of realizing I was completely wrong when I bought – hook, line and sinker – the silly notions advanced by such crackpot scientists as Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb), misguided sociologists as William Catton (Overshoot), rogue economists like Herman Daly (Ecological Economics), and the group of MIT scientists who (imagine the folly) used computer models to reach their conclusions in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study. . . .

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Observe Earth Hour Tonight & Take the Think Small Pledge

I encourage you to join millions of people around the world tonight in observing Earth Hour. From 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. turn off all your lights and unnecessary electrical devices, in a gesture acknowledging you understand and will continue to do something about the urgent need to, individually and collectively, reduce our use of fossil fuels.

Ostensibly this is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the climate disruption they cause. Even if this weren’t the case, I would suggest it’s important we acknowledge there is a finite supply of these fuels on the planet, and we have no right to burn through most of it in 300 years, leaving none for the use of future generations. That kind of thinking is relatively new to us, but it’s the type of thinking we must do now that we’ve filled the planet with 7 billion of us. This intergenerational golden rule is one of the bases of my quest for our civilization to achieve sustainability. . . .

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Is Earth Hour a Crock?

Tomorrow at 8:30 pm people around the world will be turning off their lights for one hour in a symbolic gesture. What does that symbolize? On the plus side, it’s a symbol of widespread awareness of the impact of humankind’s activity on the climate. It also serves as a reminder  each of us has the power to make a difference, and when large numbers of us do something, it adds up. For those reasons I’ll be participating in and supporting Earth Hour.

The truth-teller and cultural critic in me, however, also feels compelled to comment on how we can and should improve on Earth Hour. Obviously, we need to extend our awareness and our actions to the other 8,759 hours of the year. If your family observes Earth Hour Saturday night, please gather in the dark and make plans for how you will shrink your footprint throughout the year. If all you do is douse the lights an hour each year, you are wasting your time. . . .

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Toward a Sustainable World Economy

Today’s guest post in our series honoring the 40th anniversary of the landmark Limits to Growth study is by William Rees. Rees, along with Mathis Wackernagel, originated ecological footprint analysis. My interview with Dr. Rees for GrowthBusters was one of the last conducted before completion of the film. I left that interview thinking I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble – rather than devoting six years to funding and producing the film, I could have simply recorded this interview and released it. In 40 minutes Bill Rees covered, knowledgeably and eloquently, nearly every topic in the film!

BillHeadShot0609 This is part of a paper William Rees presented at the Institute for New Economic Thinking Annual Conference in Bretton Woods one year ago. INET is doing some great work exploring what a sustainable economy looks like and how to get there. The institute’s next annual conference is a few weeks away. . . .

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Job Creation Replaces Apple Pie

Job creation is THE mantra of every elected official and political candidate these days. Indeed, just about any act – even if foolish or dangerous – is considered desirable if it “creates jobs.” A classic example is this ad campaign funded by the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and natural gas industry trade association:

Energy-Tomorrow-1-Million-jobs-image-300x159 Today, the industry attempts to gloss over legitimate questions about the public safety of hydraulic fracturing techniques (“fracking”), and misdirect our attention to the creation of jobs and energy independence. Nothing can stand in the way of jobs and cheap, plentiful energy! Job Creation has replaced apple pie as the all-American icon. . . .

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