According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, 18 million or more Americans meditate. I would
venture to say that this is millions more than understand the deep concept of ‘Earth Overshoot’. This is an abstract and admittedly inexact science of trying to demonstrate something few ever hear about on the news, in bars, or on social media.
The whole idea behind overshoot begins with the reality few ever ponder; that there are limits to the resources the earth can produce each year that humans need to survive. The biocapacity of the earth is its restricted ability to provide natural resource through its cycles. Any grade schooler would be able to see that the fact that humanity is still growing after filling its continents with 8.1 billion consumers of water, food, shelter and energy is a trainwreck.
Humanity in total is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can produce. That reality is the subtext for most of the problems in the world and needs a deeper understanding perhaps with the tools available to us through medication.
In the most developed nations, like the US, the consumption of those resources is so high that if everyone on the planet consumed like the average American, we would need 5.1 earths to meet that demand. Australia comes in second at 4.1 planets. The more developed the nation, the higher the individual ecological footprint.
Now billionaire entrepreneurs, namely Elon Musk, have their portfolios set on investing on colonizing Mars. Others talk about checking out other Goldilocks planets, the ones with similar conditions to the earth and ones with the possibility of having life on them. They see dollar signs and live in the delusion that we are living in the Star Trek universe. Those planets are far, far away. For example the planet we have named Proxima Centauri b is in what is known as in the habitable zone of its star, but is a whopping 4.2 light years OR 108,000 years away give or take the speed of the rocket ship. So until warp speed is invented or Uber Eats delivers in outer space, it would be wiser to stop destroying the Earth’s biosphere in a perpetual state of aggravated overshoot. To survive as a species dependent on a limited planet, our energies would be better placed on deeply examining the road we are on, one that cannot possibly sustain all of us with our current demand and numerical status let alone our future demand.
Americans are not going to willingly give up their big SUV’s microwaves, electric bikes, computers, big screen TV’s, refrigerator/freezers and air travel. Adding more Americans to this overconsumption disaster is ludicrous. When people come into America they are mostly coming from poorer countries, and they immediately start consuming more goods as soon as they get themselves established. On average they increase their ecological footprint by 4 X what it was in their home country. This raises the temperature on our ever-warming planet as our carbon footprint grows to accommodate this migration.
Sit in a room with the lights down low and quiet music playing. Perhaps light a few candles and burn some incense too. Now close your eyes and imagine our planet with all its mountains and deserts, its oceans and rivers, its prairies, and forests. Imagine that they all need to be left undisturbed and unpolluted in order to sustain us. In your mind’s eye visualize the oceans and how they evaporate to create clouds that then rain to fill our rivers and aquifers with water for us to use for everything from making our coffee to filling our swimming pools. Now imagine how slow the water cycle is and that it’s job of producing fresh water can so easily be used up. Just ask those in South Africa who must walk for miles to obtain enough for just one day. Some wells are hundreds of feet deep and cannot get filled up with a few rain events. Add to that a few news stories about climate change created drought and you have the fixings of overshoot. From there it is not hard to imagine that we are in even deeper doo-doo because the current condition of our resources is that of being battered with abusive extractions and growing demands.
While you are sitting cross legged on a comfortable pillow visualize how many people reside on the third planet from the sun. Start snapping your fingers once a second and mediate on the fact that to reach 8.1 billion seconds you would be sitting there snapping your fingers way passed your need for assisted living, it is over 248 years.
The US, the number one consumption country, currently has 366 million people in it, up from 203,392,031 when the 1970 census was taken in the year of the first Earth Day. That means that we have grown by 162 million in just 54 years. Close your eyes, hold your middle finger with your thumb and absorb the fact that every 1,000,000 seconds equals 11 days. Now snap your fingers once a second and don’t stop till you reach 162 million seconds. Your fingers might get a bit sore for that would take 1,875 days. The US has the power to control its population for the good news is that it is not coming from a high fertility rate, something very personal and challenging to mitigate. It is coming from out -of -control migration of people from other countries, and it matters not if people come through legal channels or steal across the border the unsustainable state of overshoot still runs its engine overtime.
Population growth doesn’t mean progress, and those high rises popping up everywhere doesn’t set us up for a good future. It sets us up for scarcity, poverty, misery suffering and early death. We can keep digging deeper wells and mine copper dust instead of nuggets. We can recycle our old batteries and metal for a while, but not for long and not without a tremendous cost in pollution and harm to miners.
We are deep into overshoot because the earth just can’t produce all of the resources we need. This year Earth Overshoot Day is on August 1, meaning that humanity's demand for resources exceeds the Earth's ability to regenerate them within a year.
This day is calculated by dividing the number of resources the earth can regenerate by the number of resources it demands and multiplying by the number of days in the year. In other words, the world is now falling short of the demand by 5 months. This of course is an abstraction for we are in in constant overshoot for each and every day we add approximately 227,000 people to our global population.
In a deep mediative trance try to imagine what would happen if every US citizen and leader understood the suicide mission that is population growth and the consumption that stems from it. We would come up with immigration laws that were more sustainable from a resource perspective. We would be sure our policies would not add to our growth. We would say aloud we are full, overflowing and headed to a self-imposed diminished quality of life if we don’t do something soon. As our traffic jams and homelessness increase while our open land for wildlife is doing a deep dive it is time to consider the harsh reality that our country may be expansive, but it is not limitless.
Imagine how the world could look forward to a brighter future. If you could reach a deep awareness through meditation, this truth would emerge: the cycles and forces of nature are in charge. We may be powerful players, but mother nature is not a reality we can transgress without suffering and earth overshoot day is here to remind us that we are playing with fire.