Using the Earth’s resources - Unsustainable demands

Today is “Earth overshoot day” — the ever-earlier date on the calendar that marks the point in the year when we have consumed all of the resources the planet is capable of producing in a full year. 

That it has taken just eight months to exhaust everything produced by agriculture, forests, and seas points to a recklessness, a denial and dysfunction that must have profound consequences. That while doing so we have outstripped the planet’s annual capacity to absorb waste products, including carbon dioxide, shows our insatiable appetites in a far darker light.

The Global Footprint Network warns that it would take 1.5 planets as bountiful as Earth to satisfy human demands. This scale of consumption pushes the planet into “ecological debt” earlier and earlier each year. In 2000 this point was not reached until October.