GrowthBusters

We lost scientific and environmental icon Paul Ehlich on March 13. We're honoring his memory by revisiting Dave Gardner's first interview with Paul, outside his Stanford University office in 2007 for the documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth.

Ehrlich was most famous for authoring, with wife Anne Ehrlich, the bestselling 1968 book, The Population Bomb. While...

The academy awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics is still drinking pro-growth Kool-Aid, while spiritual leader Acharya Prashant is serving up a healthier recipe - insightful truth about ecological overshoot. We examine both in this episode. Technology headlines much of the conversation. "Technology is not a way out of overshoot; it is a slower way in," according to Prashant. 

Population growth is making headlines for the wrong reason or with a biased perspective. It's too easy to draw erroneous conclusions about dropping fertility rates around the world. A surge of news stories from NPR compels us to offer both praise and criticism. Population growth appears to be coming to an end, and that's getting all the oxygen, not the fact that we have an overpopulation crisis. In fa...

Just say "NO." Some approaches to "abundance" are healthy, but one brand of abundance that's been capturing the cultural moment lately is a recipe for a dead planet. Dave and Stephanie assess key points made by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book, Abundance. The result, a sound thrashing. The authors believe "America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs." They advocate elimina...

In this trial run for the "GrowthBusters Book Club," we discuss The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World - by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Cannibal economies, gift economies, reciprocity, and doughnut economics all come up.

Prolific river protector Gary Wockner gives us the straight scoop on the state of the Colorado River (and others), and the growth obsession that keeps southwest states and cities from responding rationally to increasingly scarce water resources.
 
TODAY, nearly half the world's population experiences severe water shortages at least part of the year. So far, fresh water issues in the American Southwest amount – mostly - to first wor...

Learn about a new think tank that's doing some of the most important thinking on the planet. Matt Orsagh is co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance and co-author of a just-published white paper, By Disaster Or Design: How Finance Can Evolve to Avoid the Worst of the Ecological Challenges We Face and Enable the Transition to a Better Economic Model.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos thinks the U.S. can grow its way out of a massive deficit. He says we need a "growth mindset." Stephanie and Dave call it a "suicide economic model," and note that growth addiction is exactly what afflicts most policymakers around the world. The dynamic duo discuss the little-understood fact that a shrinking economy can be healthy – when it accompanies a contracting popul...

Unplug from an overshoot economy serving a growth-obsessed oligarchy. On March 15, the multitudes will begin a general strike across the U.S. – starving our profit and growth obsessed system. The commoners will reclaim power taken by the elite. Learn about Shutdown315 as Stephanie and Dave discuss, and chat with two Shutdown315 movement organizers, Chet and Bones.

In the face of accelerated global warming and increasingly severe consequences of climate disruption, UN projections are outdated and understating the problem, and the U.S. is going to produce and burn fossil fuels like they're going out of business. Meanwhile Trump wants to be sure Gazans aren't using condoms to float bombs over the border, and to be sure condoms and other family planning resources a...

Is optimism required in order to alert folks to our ecological overshoot emergency? Dave and Stephanie discuss the challenge of communicating the depth and urgency of overshoot without shutting people down.

Dave and Stephanie dig into what caused voters to ignore Donald Trump's felony convictions, indecency, incompetence, narcissism, and dishonesty – and elect him president. This includes a review of the 50-year war waged by the mega-rich and corporations to undermine civility, compassion, equity and rule of law, to elevate the free enterprise system, rob the working class and enrich themselves. The Lewi...

A new study debunks depopulation panic. For decades economists have perpetuated the false narrative, "If population growth reverses and begins to decline, the economy is doomed." This belief has so frequently been repeated by economists, politicians, business people and the public, that it is generally taken as gospel. Psychologists have characterized the phenomenon as the illusory-truth effect, or be...

We made it VERY clear that Musk's worries about population collapse are ill-founded, and that attracted thousands more listeners than usual to our podcast. How did that happen? What kind of comments did we get? Find out in this episode. And get important truths about overshoot and overpopulation.

The Michigan Governor is apparently unaware that the world, the U.S. and even Michigan are overpopulated. Michigan population has been growing a little too slowly for her taste, so Whitmer has appointed a Chief Growth Officer and formed the Growing Michigan Together Council. Not surprisingly, her bottom line is to "spur economic growth."

Are many vegans self-righteous, overbearing and insufferable in their efforts to recruit us? Would you believe "overpopulation" is still a taboo word? Or that human population numbers are still an "off-limits" topic at some conferences? This episode continues the conversation we began in episode 79 with five smart people:
 
Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance
Sarah Bexell, director of humane education at the Ins...

Students in a DU ecological economics class discuss their biggest concerns and how our society might overcome them. Overshoot, polarization, the American Dream, politics, selfish individualism, and the capitalism growth imperative are among the topics explored – as GrowthBuster Dave Gardner sits down with leaders of tomorrow.
 
Dave is joined by Professor Paul Sutton at the University of Denver and students Lilia Davis, Julia Gaine...

Five thought leaders break the silence on the role of human overpopulation in ecological overshoot –with an informed, engaging conversation about the subject. This is what intelligent discourse sounds like.

Why do discussions of overpopulation often elicit emotional responses of fear, anger, or indignation? Are anger and indignation what prevents productive discussion of population? These responses in a graduate college class provide an opportunity to explore how we might pave the way for productive conversations. Our guest in this episode, Professor Christopher Bystroff of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute wonders whether a "global th...