OUR SOCIETY IS NOT SUSTAINABLE by Brishen Hoff

Our society is not sustainable. Our goal is to grow the GDP from one year to the next.

GDP is the total dollar value of goods and services consumed.

So our goal is to consume an ever increasing amount of goods and services on a finite planet. This is outrageous!

Opening a new landfill, building more houses, spilling oil into the ocean, building a new mall with parking lots on farm land, manufacturing cars, etc all serve to grow the GDP.

Size of economy or GDP = (# of people) X (average person's consumption)

The more people there are, the more economic activity, the higher the GDP.

Because resources per capita declines as the number of people increases, I think GDP per capita is quickly becoming inversely correlated with GDP.

The more people there are, the poorer each person becomes on average (of course this doesn't affect the major CEOs atop the economic growth pyramid scheme)

One way the Canadian, US, Australian, UK, etc governments have been trying to grow the GDP is to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants for exponential population growth. This also brings cheap labour for CEOs.

In the USA, a new study shows that immigrants quadruple their greenhouse gas emissions upon arrival: http://www.cis.org/GreenhouseGasEmissions

This doesn't seem to bother the CEOs.
To further illustrate how unsustainable our society is, in the USA there were more babies born in 2007 than any other year in their history.

There was a record 4.315 million babies born in the USA in 2007 which is more than any year of the so-called baby boom. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-16-baby-boomlet_N.htm

According to the latest WWF Living Planet report, humanity is consuming natural resources 30% faster than the earth can produce them and by 2030 we will need 2 planets.

The report says that from 1970 to 2005, global biodiversity has declined by 33%.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/29/climatechange-endangeredhabitats/print

If you want to live in a sustainable society, you cannot have population growth of any kind. Population growth is simply not sustainable. Humanity is already in ecological overshoot.

SOLUTIONS: (If you want to live in a sustainable society...)
1) Do not reproduce and tell others why that is important.
2) Advocate reducing immigration intake so that our population can decline to a sustainable level.