We’re in debt to the Earth. How can we repay it?
On Christmas Day 1971, for the first time in Homo sapiens’ roughly 300,000 years of hobbling about, humanity’s demands on the Earth exceeded what the planet could provide in a year. That practice has continued, and worsened, for the last half century.
Since the early 2000s, the nonprofit Global Footprint Network has calculated what it calls “Earth Overshoot Day,” the date on which we outstrip our resources each year. At present, human society consumes resources at a rate that would take 1.75 Earths to sustain. So, from August 1 of this year onward, everything we consume adds to our collective debt. In the language of ecological economists: We’re in overshoot.
The date itself is a handy construct, meant to illuminate a larger problem — in reality, the Earth does not reset each year. In the science of planetary …