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  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    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
  • ”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
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”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
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”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
  • ”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
  • ”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

Australia: New Political Party Promotes Sustainable Population

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

There are two components to making our civilization truly sustainable. One is changing our own personal behavior – how much energy and resources we consume in our daily lives, as well as how many children we have and how soon we start our families. The other is changing the system – public policy goals and system structures. Today public policy almost universally seeks and subsidizes growth.

Getting elected leaders to eschew the outdated and destructive goal of perpetual growth is one of our biggest challenges. First, we have to get them to question unexamined assumptions about growth being the path to prosperity. Second, we have to free them from being handcuffed to growth by campaign funding from growth profiteers. . . .

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Limits to Growth – 40th Anniversary

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

40 years ago today, a group of MIT scientists made their first public report on a study that came to be known as Limits to Growth. They had used systems dynamics to build a computer model of human activity on Earth. They called the model World3. Today I want to share a clip from GrowthBusters about that landmark study:

The business-as-usual scenario played out by World3 sounded an alarm – that we need to make some changes if we want to avoid overshooting the capacity of the planet and the ugly collapse that would ensue. For the next 40 years we kept hitting the snooze button.

Now, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that study, it is time for a new wake-up call. From today through Earth Day, I intend to honor that study and reawaken the discussion surrounding limits to growth on a finite planet. I’m not alone in this quest. Many brilliant, articulate experts have agreed to share their thoughts with us. And the Club of Rome, which commissioned that original Limits to Growth study, will have a lot going on, too. I have some twists, turns and surprises planned along the way. So fasten your seatbelt! . . .

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Limits to Growth – Bacteria in a Bottle

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Retired physics professor Al Bartlett (to whom the GrowthBusters movie was dedicated), is world famous both for his Laws Related to Sustainability and his lecture about exponential growth. Audiences frequently tell me this segment from GrowthBusters is one of the most powerful. Share it with your lab partners (for the experiment we’re starting tomorrow, see below). And share it with everyone who needs to grasp this concept.


We’re one day away from launching our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary campaign. Be sure to check back tomorrow (subscribe to this blog at the right to be sure you don’t miss it). That’s also when you’ll start your exponential growth demonstration/experiment, so be sure you’ve got the supplies ready (see yesterday’s post). You’re invited to share your experiment experience with us as you go along (written comments, photos, even video), so consider chronicling your progress in one or more of these ways. . . .

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Try This Exponential Growth Experiment

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

On Monday the GrowthBusters project begins a campaign to honor the 40th anniversary of the landmark Limits to Growth study. If you’re not already subscribed to my blog, please do so – you won’t regret it. During March and April I’ll be sharing insights from the leading thinkers in sustainability, economics, population and environment. I’ll also be posting segments from the GrowthBusters movie related to the study. You’ll also be treated to clips that never made the film, including an interview filmed just last week with Jorgen Randers, one of the original MIT team on the study.

As we go along, we’ll also perform a little experiment to demonstrate the power of exponential growth. Now you may think you have a good handle on the mathematics of growth. I feel I certainly do. But I’ll wager that as the experiment proceeds, we may be just as astonished as everyone else. This experiment is also a wonderful way to engage your family (especially your kids), your roommates, or office colleagues. You can have some fun and spark some interesting conversations. . . .

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Techno-Optimism or The Good Life?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

Morning Joe on MSNBC is one of my favorite programs. It’s on from 4 to 7 in the morning where I live, so I watch while I’m stretching and making my first cup of, well, joe. This morning’s program had this interesting segment about a book called Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. It offers a glimpse of classic techno-optimism.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There was a lot of talk in this segment about having a phone, a car, a toilet, air-conditioning, etc. Certainly indoor plumbing, good health care, and electricity are major improvements to our lives. But the book’s co-author, Peter Diamandis, is chairman and CEO of the X-Prize Foundation, which offers financial incentives for groundbreaking new technologies. It’s not surprising he places a lot of faith in technology. It is, however, disappointing. . . .

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