Look out your window. I don’t know about you, but from my downtown window I see more green than grey – more nature than man, by a long shot. Maybe I’m in the minority. Maybe it’s one of the perks of living here in the Evergreen state. Still, watching the creatures and trees grow stronger and sturdier each day, it’s hard to imagine that anything could truly put a dent in nature’s ability to thrive.
That really couldn’t be farther from correct.
Monday, August 8th, was 2016’s Earth Overshoot Day. Don’t let the capitalized ‘Day’ fool you, this isn’t a holiday. It’s the exact day each year in which “humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year,” according to Global Footprint Network. Any resources we use after that, down to a single salmon dinner, is creating a defecit that our planet legitimately cannot recover from.
Pretty scary, right? After all, that’s almost five full months in which we’re overspending our planet’s resources… and the vast majority are doing this entirely in ignorance of any kind of issue. Raise your hand if you’ve never heard of Earth Overshoot Day. No, you’re not in trouble – the point is that if you, a decently well-educated and self-aware university student, hadn’t heard of it, that speaks volumes for the awareness of the uneducated masses.
The precise measurements behind Earth Overshoot Day are calculated by comparing each city, state, or nation’s biocapacity with their collective ecological footprint. Now, you may be wondering how exactly it matches up.
Pretty much like that, actually. High five to India for being the only nation on this list not using at least half-again their share. Australia, meanwhile, practically makes resource consumption an art form. I’d say, “Shame on you, Australia,” but I’m really just glad that someone beat us for ‘nature’s least favorite people’.
Why is this even an issue?
For this, we take a trip back to the mid-1800s, hosted by our pal William Lloyd. He introduced the world to the concept of a “resource dilemma”, a conflict that most had experienced in some way but few had a name for. The concept of the resource dilemma can best be explained by Lloyd’s process called the “tragedy of the commons”.
It goes like this: Say there are four farmers who share a common field, and each can have one cow on it. These four cows can graze to their heart’s content without interrupting the sustainability of the field itself – that is, the ability for the field to grow back in time to continue to feed the cows. However, say a fifth farmer moves in and wants to add his cow to the mix. On the one hand, it’s only fair… But on the other hand, that suddenly makes the arrangement unsustainable. The fifth farmer must decide whether to take his ‘fair share’ or to conserve the natural resources so that they continue to renew. (Schneider et al., p. 300)
Almost unanimously, a fifth farmer in that scenario would indeed choose to graze his cow in the commons as well.
Now translate that into more modern and global terms: At some point, there were enough resources and few enough humans that everyone alive could use whatever resources they pleased (and even waste extra) and they wouldn’t even make a dent. However, at some point in the past thousand years, the scales tipped. All of a sudden, there were too many humans and not quite enough resources to sustain them. Then there were even more humans and not nearly enough resources to sustain them.
And even knowing this, each human still decides to ‘graze his cow’, to take what he or she perceives is their fair share, equal to everyone else’s fair shares, with no regard toward the fact that these ‘fair shares’ do not even remotely calculate out to just one single Earth. Our commons – our planet – has become unsustainable based on the amount that we’re taxing its natural resources.
But there is good news.
Well – for a relative interpretation of ‘good’. Using the listed history of Earth Overshoot Days found at the bottom of this page right here, I calculated the average amount of days “lost” in the ten years from 1970 to 1980 and then the average amount of days “lost” in the last ten years (2006 – present). The results were actually pretty interesting.
During the 70s, the Earth lost 49 days of sustainability (bumping the Earth Overshoot Day from December 24th to November 5th), or an average of 4.9 per year.
In the most recent decade, the Earth lost just 16 days of sustainability (from August 24th to August 8th), an average of just 1.6 days per year.
How’s that for a curve-ball? Despite how sad and desecrated our planet may be, we’re actually not treating it quite as badly as we did in the 70’s. No, scratch that – not nearly as badly. One-third as badly, mathematically.
That doesn’t, however, give us permission to slack off. The vague feeling of superiority you’re probably feeling at the aforementioned news is going to wear off pretty quickly if we don’t find every possible means to sustain this trend toward increased environmentalism.
What can we do?
That, my friend, is a question with entirely too many answers to address in full in one humble blog post. Instead, I turn you over to the Global Footprint Network and the official Earth Overshoot Day website, on which they have six “pledges” you can take in order to start to minimize your own personal eco-footprint. (Scroll to the bottom – they’re there, I promise).
For now, this is Marissa Glebe, signing off.
Tags: environment blog, environmentalism
Seffdy has a nice ring to it (I’ve certainly been called worse!), but as an alternative, you can call me Sara (my real name) if you prefer. I’m still getting used to being on a somewhat public forum, so I haven’t edited my username yet. I look forward to reading your future blog posts!
Holy wow – I didn’t expect this kind of positive feedback. I don’t think you can reply to each person individually on this interface (correct me if I’m wrong) so I’ll have to fit them all in here.
Courtney,
My jaw dropped when I read your reply. I expected to get a bit more backlash for being so terribly informal about things (taking things seriously is not exactly a strong suit of mine), but here you are telling me to publish! I can’t even begin to fathom where I’d try to publish something like this, I usually deal in fiction and am totally blind on the nonfiction/article market.
sfd5142,
Firstly, trivia: Your username is seven syllables long, and that’s four more than I plan to bother with. I’m calling you SFD (“Seffdy”) in my head and there’s not much you can do about it. 🙂
On a mildly more serious note, your Black Friday comparison is a great contrast. Consumerism versus Environmentalism, inversely-proportional only halfway by coincidence. Thanks for bringing that to the table!
Jennifer,
I wonder if China’s relatively low number could have anything to do with the collectivistic mindset? Recycling, as an example, is a goal which doesn’t directly benefit the individual beyond a few warm fuzzy feelings, but it contributes to society as a whole on a much greater level.
Lauren,
Glad I had the opportunity to broaden your horizons. Earth Overshoot Day is actually a pretty chilling concept, even if it doesn’t technically apply to the immediate future in any massive way. One might even say it’s a concrete footstone in our early predictions of the eventual apocalypse.
I’m raising my hand, I’ve never heard of overshoot day. That’s crazy.
Thank you for your example of the cows. That’s a really good illustration on how our earth has become unsustainable, especially to someone like me who had no idea that overshoot day existed. You kind of figure that with 7.4 billion people on this planet there would be a storage but no one ever talks about it. This is very eye opening.
Amazing post. Super informative and fun to read as well. I am shocked with the info provided. The country that shocks me the most is China. With such population concerns, the country manages to be at the bottom of the list?!? What are they doing differently than the US and Australia? What can the US and Australia learn from China?
I second Courtney’s opinion — great post! Earth Overshoot Day is like Black Friday, but in reverse. While Black Friday (the Friday late in November following Thanksgiving) is roughly the point in the calendar year that retailers begin to move from losses to profits (from the red on the balance sheet to the black), Earth Overshoot Day is when we begin to head into the red, so to speak. It’s astounding that this occurs so early in the year, and I shudder to think of how the infographic comparing countries will look in ten years. I doubt that the developed world will have done much to curb consumption, while the developing world’s consumer demand is likely to increase exponentially.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I don’t think I’ve read such an entertaining, engaging, and informative article anywhere, including magazines and journals, in quite some time. If it’s all right with our professor, please consider submitting this for publication; I truly think it’s a phenomenal piece of writing that deserves all the accolades possible.