My informal survey of friends revealed that few have heard of Earth Overshoot Day.
I explain it this way: It’s a calculation.. It’s basically what the earth can produce in terms of bio-capacity minus what we consume. According to the smart folks at Global Footprint Network, “Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth can renew during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 60% more than what can be renewed – or as much as if we lived on 1.6 planet. From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity grows the ecological deficit which has been increasing steadily since the world fell in ecological overshoot in the early 1970s..”
This day is designed to shed a light on how we are taking more from the Earth in the course of a year than it can produce. Kudos to GFN for trying yet another creative way to innovate a much needed soapbox from which to pontificate that indeed the well is running dry. Earth Overshoot Day has a bit of good news to report, commemorated on August 22 in 2020, it is three weeks later than 2019, due to the economic slowdown caused by the corona virus pandemic. However, we are still running way too short due to both our overpopulation and its evil twin; overconsumption.
The problem is that Earth Overshoot Day is a model and essentially an abstraction as most models are. On the surface it seems like we are better off at the beginning of the calendar year than we are on some pre-determined date, when really every day is overshoot day and has been for a very long time. The earth’s cycles do not follow some human determined schedule. Its cycles are mostly very slow moving and over billions of years has stored much of what it has produced in the form of minerals, soil and fresh water.
Humans were defined by the author Daniel Quinn Ishmael series as either Takers or Leavers. The leavers were the hunter gatherers who left something for the future generations and the takers do just that, they just keep taking and taking from the earth. I think that all humans are essentially takers, not because we are intrinsically evil, but because that is our niche in the food web. Long before elitists were promoting neo-capitalism during their martini-laced power lunches, humans were altering the earth with slash and burn agriculture. Centuries before industrialization darkened the skies and polluted our lakes and rivers, we were pushing some of the greatest species ever to evolve into the abyss of extinction. The Dodo bird’s extinction happened before the first plastics arrived on the scene, it succumbed to the way human livestock overtook their habitats. The passenger pigeon which once darkened the skies in its migration was last on anyone’s menu in the early part of the 20th century due to overhunting.
Humans must rely on the plants to photosynthesize as producers, and the first and second level consumers of plants make up the protein we then consume for our nourishment. Some of us can rely on mostly plants to produce our food but in no way does this mean that we can pardon ourselves from our position as takers of the planet. We are a needy bunch, from our perch as an apex predator, and our needs have now been exponentially exacerbated by an incredible increase in the production of highly processed products which are both toxic and carbon producing in their production and problematic in their disposal.
Every week or so, I take an informal survey of the products I own and use. I ask myself which of them was made or shipped to me without the use of fossil fuels? I also ask myself what is their ultimate destiny? From the dental floss in our bathroom, to my framed photographs on our walls, from the bananas on our counter to the hairbrush on my nightstand, the answers are always the same. Everything I buy, own and use, no matter if it was bought used or not, came from the earth and will go back to the earth. In between carbon gases were burned in their production and transportation and trapped in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gas effects, which are now altering weather patterns, and with it altering our ability to grow food, come from all of these not-so-innocent products. Landfills are multi-colored with non-biodegradable plastics, wires, batteries and other leftovers from our infamously throw-away society. Early hunter gatherers may have altered landscapes, but they left mostly bones behind.
We modern humans have become the most egregious takers for we leave behind products that the earth has no idea how to accommodate, while carving up our biosphere in the pursuit of our insatiable appetites for more. Even if we were to wake up and stop the merry go round of ridiculous consumption, for which there are too many examples to mention, our numbers would have to calm down too, to an extraordinary degree.
So why is everyday overshoot day? Why should the word overshoot be on our lips and in our public discourse and in our news coverage? Because we are on a highway to hell, paved with the actions of limitless demands of a planet with limited capacity. Because at populations which have grown by millions in the ever-consuming US and billions in the world, we have been too successful and nature always punishes the animals who step out of their ecological boundaries.
We need to put on the brakes, (reduce our population in every country especially those with ‘guilty ‘on their consumption scorecards) wear a seatbelt ( stop our love affair with economic growth) and have airbags installed (learn and value the way we depend on healthy ecosystems ) in a mission to reverse the trajectory of crashing into the earth’s limit to support a specie that is busy creating its own epitaph: Here lies a specie smart enough to know it was headed off a cliff, but not wise enough to turn itself around.