Albert Bartlett Image source: hubbertpeak.com

I recently offered suggestions for what to read if you read only one book or one article on the topics covered here. But some may prefer listening to reading. Well, for you I suggest Albert Bartlett. I quoted Dr. Bartlett a few days ago, and have done so previously. But I’ve not introduced his work here in any detail. Time to fix that.

Al Bartlett, physics professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, and a former national president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, is one of the clearest thinkers on issues of population growth, sustainability, and resource consumption. He makes his points with solid logic, often bolstered by simple arithmetic, such that they’re nearly irrefutable.

And Al Bartlett minces no words. He gets right to the point and tells you where he stands.

You can find his articles on a number of sites. One on which they’re clearly presented is Minnesotans For Sustainability, which archives some at the bottom of this page. More still are at the Hubbert Peak site. Some of those articles could, themselves, serve as that “one article” to read, especially if your interest is more in the “big picture” than in methods of dealing locally with sprawl. (It turns out, though, he knows plenty about the latter as well.)

But to really appreciate Al Bartlett’s message you should listen to a lecture for which he’s famous. Considering himself a kind of evangelist for the message concerning population growth and energy consumption, he’s presented his talk, Arithmetic, Population and Energy, over 1,500 times in countries around the world. Many feel they come away from the 57 minute talk with a new clarity in their understanding of the issues involved. Listen to the talk on the web and see if you don’t feel the same way. Then take a look at an entertaining article about Dr. Bartlett and the lecture. For more, you can order his book, The Essential Exponential! For the Future of Our Planet

You may find that Al Bartlett’s works on population growth and other topics can serve as an anchor to keep your thinking focused on the pure logic and indisputable facts of these often contentious issues.

I’ll leave you with a few Al Bartlett quotes:

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

(Listen to the lecture, and you’ll understand why.)

THE GREAT CHALLENGE: Can you think of any problem, in any area of human endeavor, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?

And finally…

A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH: If any fraction of the observed global warming can be attributed to the activities of humans, then this constitutes positive proof that the human population, living as we do, has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. THIS SITUATION IS NOT SUSTAINABLE!