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.

In 1961 it was not reached at all. Half a century ago we used about three-quarters of Earth’s capacity to produce food, timber, fish and and to absorb greenhouse gases. Most countries were in resource credit.

Today 86% of the world’s population lives in countries where the demands made on nature outstrip what that country’s resources can replenish.

These warnings are not new and have been expressed in many ways over many years but the toll we exert on the planet’s capacity to sustain us continues to grow.

Maybe its time to read again the wonderful fable about the boy who cried wolf ...