Albert Allen Bartlett was born on this date 103 years ago to Willard W. and Marguerite Allen Bartlett in Shanghai, China, where his father was principal of the Shanghai America School. At three months old, a cholera outbreak in Shanghai caused his family to send him and his mother to a relative's home in Indiana to wait for his father's return. Bartlett earned a B.A. in physics at Golgate University in 1944. Then, "One of my professors heard that there was an address, 'Box 1663,' in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they were hiring physicists. Sounded like adventure to me, so I applied. Didn't know what it was, and they didn't tell me, and I was accepted." He hitchiked and hopped freight trains to Santa Fe and spend the next 25 months working for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in physics at Harvard by 1951. He joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1950 and was a leader in physics educations in the 1960s and 1970s. Bartlett viewed sustainable growth as an oxymoron, since a constant growth rate is exponential. He gave us this challenge: "Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale ... whose long-term solution is ... aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population ...?" In September, 1969, he first gave a talk titled "Arithmetic, Population and Energy," based on his paper, "Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis" in the American Journal of Physics. And over the next 36 years, he presented the talk on average every 8.6 days at many universities, high schools, and to other audiences. He began the talk, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." He examined the consequences steady growth in a finite environment and observed this growth would exhaust fossil fuels sooner than expected. I know my lifestyle is unsustainable. I do what I can: My campervan is a PHEV, so it burns less gas than most. I try to travel only occasionally and bike a lot. But my lifestyle is even more dependent on the global supply chain than folks who keep a garden and walk to the Farmers Market. I recognize the climate crisis is real, and I believe measuring success by GDP growth is bound to destroy us. I fear our society will be unlivable sooner than we think. But I'm selfish enough to want to keep camping, traveling, and biking in the time I have left. Dr. Bartlett spent his life educating as many people as he could about our unsustainable economy. So I admire his example! Credits: https://w.wiki/HnvG https://lib.bgsu.edu/findingaids/repositories/4/resources/421 Photo: Public Domain https://www.lanl.gov/about/history-innovation/badges I needed to get back quickly, so I planned a short, mostly flat ride. From this starting point, it's always tempting to do the big climb first, but this time I started with a fast descent to the valley. It was an easy ride. Not to hot. I pushed a little harder than usual on the flat, to try to make up for the lack of climbing. But my heart rate stayed low anyway.