On Christmas Day, 1971, for the first time in Homo sapiens About 300,000 years of moving around, humanity’s demands on the earth have exceeded what the planet can supply in a year. That practice continued, and worsened, for the last half century.
Since the early 2000s, the non-profit Global Footprint Network has calculated what it calls “Earth Overshoot Day,” the date we exceed our resources each year. Currently, human society is consuming resources at a rate that would take 1.75 Earths to sustain. So, from August 1 this year, everything we consume contributes to our collective debt. In the language of ecological economists: We are in excess.
The date itself is a convenient construct, meant to alleviate a larger problem—in reality, the Earth doesn’t reset itself every year. In the science of planetary accounting, going overboard is more like charging groceries to a credit card after you’ve already blown your monthly budget shopping online. It can’t go on forever. Eventually those bills come due.
The debt we accrue manifests itself in three main ways: Garbage collectedexhaust resources, and ecosystems degrade. As these impacts grow, the Earth’s ability to regenerate diminishes – what this means in the long term remains unclear, but it seems likely that the consequences will worsen as our debt increases. “We’re still living off the land,” said David Lin, the chief scientific officer at the Global Footprint Network. Modern life makes it easy to forget – removed, as most are, from the touch and scent of soil and crop. The concept of surplus was, in a sense, developed to remind us of the demands we make on the land.
Two researchers at the University of British Columbia, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, created a measure called the ecological footprint in the early 1990sand with it the idea of leftovers. They intended it to be a “comprehensive sustainability metric,” encompassing not just a single dimension like greenhouse gas emissions, but the full range of human impacts on the planet. Wackernagel went on to co-found the Global Footprint Network to track down and hopefully end the excess his metrics revealed.
Today, the University of York’s Ecological Footprint Initiative has taken over responsibility for aggregating and maintaining all the data needed to track, estimate and project, for every nation around the world, the metrics that can be used to exceed understand and correct. These measures include ecological footprint – which describes the cumulative impact, including carbon emissions, of humanity’s urban and industrial activities such as logging, fishing, farming, building and mining – and biocapacity, which reflects the capacities of forests, fish stocks, soil, landscapes . , and mountain slopes to recover from human demands. Comparing these two metrics determines whether we are in exceedance territory, and if we are, how bad it is.
Crunching these numbers is no simple task. “We combined about 47 million rows of input data to generate the system,” says Eric Miller, the environmental economist who leads the Ecological Footprint Initiative, with results dating back as far as 1961.
From those tables, the Global Footprint Network and Miller’s team show not only how much we blew past our planetary budget this year, but also a running total of our debt. And although the date of Leftovers Day has remained relatively stable over the past decade, the debt continues to pile up. Right now, the Global Footprint Network estimates that our debt totals 20.5 Earth years. So, if all human activity stopped at this moment, the planet would not recover from all the damage we have done to it until 2045.
Global Footprint Network
Miller noted that discussing things in terms of ecological footprint and surplus both helps quantify the problem of overconsumption and creates the space to discuss comprehensive solutions to the overlapping ecological crises facing the planet. This “implies not only reducing absolute emissions,” Miller said, “but also changing the way we use lands and waters.” For example, it can help us understand how certain climate solutions, such as biofuels for aviation, can solve one problem—namely, carbon emissions—while introducing others, such as harvesting crops to feed airplanes instead of people.
From the point of view of the ecological footprint, climate change is not the nuclear crisis. Instead, it is simply a symptom of excess, in which the waste gases from our overactive industries accumulate in the atmosphere and warm the planet. Biodiversity loss is another symptom of overshoot. So is land degradation, deforestation, water scarcity and more.
Yet, although the United Nations Climate Secretariat has published blog posts about Earth leftoversthe subject has yet to appear in international agreements or national policy. The various commitments drawn up and accepted at the international, national, state, local and even corporate levels have put the emphasis on planet-warming pollution. “So, understandably,” Miller said, “the world is a little more caught up with the issue of greenhouse gas emissions.”
But just trying to fight the symptoms of overshoot didn’t make sense for Phoebe Barnard, a global change scientist affiliated with the University of Washington. “We all need to talk about the root causes and become aware of them so we can work on them,” she said. She and two colleagues founded a nonprofit called the Stable Planet Alliance to focus on the issue of ecological overshoot, as well as the behaviors and practices that created the problem.
“We think that the earth is placed here as a food pantry for humanity, or that resources are there for our private gain,” Barnard said, “rather than as gifts that the earth has given us.”
Barnard and her colleagues argue that tackling transcendence requires addressing harmful behaviors and beliefs, such as the pursuit of eternal growth and profit.
They place a particular focus on marketing as both a cause of the problem and a potential solution. The marketing industry has so far acted as an engine of overconsumption by making people crave things they didn’t need or desire beforehand. But, Barnard said, “what if we could use the tools of the marketing industry—which has turned the science of behavior change to a T—to get humanity off its cliff-edge cul-de-sac?”
Global Footprint Network’s approach includes not only raising awareness around Earth Overshoot Day, but also the #MoveTheDate campaignwhich promotes actions to reduce overshoot (and “move the date” of Earth Overshoot Day closer to year-end). This includes promoting things like ecosystem restoration, 15 minutes citiesgreen electricity, and regenerative agriculture. Although there is significant overlap with typical climate solutions, discussing these actions in terms of overreach underscores the fact that we are not pursue endless growth as we pursue the pursuit of owning more, finer things to achieve ever greater standards of living.
Both the Global Footprint Network and Barnard also tackle a controversial element that they say is essential to combating overpopulation – population growth and pronatalism, as Barnard and her colleagues describe the desire to expand human populations. In a post for Earth Overshoot Day, Global Footprint Network co-founder Wackernagel acknowledged the “brutal” history of efforts to limit population growth, but argued that the discussion be reshaped “in a compassionate and productive direction” that also elevates sex and gender equality and promote.
“Let’s take that conversation away from the old white men who have dominated the conversation, and get women around the world to talk about it,” Barnard said. She pointed out that the education of girls and women is often enough to lower and boost birth rates a host of other benefits.
But ultimately, the biggest challenge in tackling overshooting – just as with tackling its symptoms such as climate change – comes not from understanding the problem or the range of solutions that exist, but implementing them. After all, when we consider what it will take to reduce waste and repay our ecological debt, it’s a lot like wondering what you can do to fix your personal finances. “You can ask this in a mathematical sense,” said Lin, the Global Footprint Network scientist. But to each possibility he added, “Can you do it? Are you willing to do it?” That is the question.
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