I will leave why growth should stop until later in this post and will start with why growth must stop. Not everyone agrees that growth must stop; in my experience most of those who argue that growth can go on forever are economists. As Kenneth Boulding (himself an economist) put it: Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. I have not taken a straw poll on this, but I suspect that there would be a divide between physical sci...

At the time of writing this blog we are in the very early stages of developing our seminar. We have the idea, a title, and an organizing committee, but no sponsorship, no budget, no date and only the beginnings of a possible program - and only one speaker. Before we can identify additional speakers and build a program we need to find out who is active in the area, or in closely related areas and what ideas have already been developed. In other words we (the organizing committee) are on a jour...