A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Initially developed to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing also has evolved into a tool for generating finished professional work. Today, there are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning, prototyping, and production.

"My art is driven by a life-long interest in biology. While I was terrible in high-school science and math my education about the life sciences emerged from a wide engagement with materials and practices. Through my work as a chef I began to understand biochemistry and laboratory methods; as a hospice caregiver I worked with life support technologies and environmental controls; and through my interest in wild mushrooms I learned about taxonomies, forest ecology and husbandry.

The creative projects I work on take a variety of forms, though all are based on research, experimentation and long term planning. Recent work has included some videos about live cultures, experiments with growing fungal building materials, and founding and directing CRITTER- a salon for the natural sciences. These diverse projects stem from my fascination with the interrelationships between human beings, technology and the greater living environment."

RT @iowahawkblog: Finnish environmentalist accidentally says what environmentalists think

The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind.

"Much like the very low score Greenpeace gave Apple on their "greenness" chart thing (and much lower than other companies that were nowhere near as green as Apple) because they simply hadn't done the research. For example, HP scoring big green points for making a plan to decide on when to remove BFRs from their products, and Apple scoring very low for no plan... but they'd already eliminated use of BFRs in their products 2 years before. And the same with reduced use of lead, and expanded polystyrene, and PVC in cables etc. Then when Apple releases a press release all about this, Greenpeace claim that they are the ones making Apple behave responsibly.

Greenpeace are doing more to hurt the green cause than helping it. There's only so many times you can be a dick - like soliciting donations that will directly fun criminal damage - before people start getting turned off the message, which is the last thing we want."

But GDP is not the be all and end all of economic success. There are other ways to measure the progress of a society. One way to think about economies is as the aggregate of three sorts of capital: physical (infrastructure and the means of production), human (skills and education) and natural capital. While the first two are renewable (some argue inexhaustible), natural resources such as fossil fuels, soil, biodiversity, and even forests may be depleted, sometimes permanently.

We need an indicator that estimates the wealth of nations--natural, human, and manufactured.
The United Nations is now proposing the "Inclusive Wealth Indicator" as a challenge to the myopic focus on short-term profits and economic capital inherent in GDP. In its early findings, it found that natural capital declined 46% in Brazil and 31% in India during the last 17 years. This reduced the countries’ blazing GDP growth rates to a more modest "inclusive wealth" increase of 3% in Brazil and 9% in India. Much less to get excited about.