This is the litany: Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet's specis are dying off-more exactly, we are killing them at the staggering rate of 100,000 per year, a figure that works out to almost 2000 species per weak, 300 per day, 10 per hour, another dead species every 6 minutes. We are trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves. The world is getting progressively poorer, and it's all because of populating, or more precisely, over population. There is a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we are fast apporaching it's ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we are living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable, Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now. That's the standard and canonical litany. It's been drilled into our heads so far and so focefuly that to hear it yet once more is ... well, it's almost reasuring. It's comforting, oddly consoling- at least we are face to face with the enemies: consumption, population, mindless growth. And we know the solution: cut back, contract, make do with less. "Live simply so that others may simply live." There's just one problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every item in that dim and dreary recititaion, each and every last claim, is false. Incorrect. At variance with the truth. Not the way it is, folks.