Earth overshoot day

From the daily newsletter from the The Economist

Wednesday [August 2nd] marks Earth Overshoot Day, the day on the calendar on which humans have used more resources than ecosystems can generate for the whole year. From now until January 1st 2024 humanity will be using more natural resources—including fish stocks, fibres and medicines provided by plants and the ability of forests to sequester carbon, among many other things—than the planet can supply this year.

By consistently overspending its biological budget, humanity is reducing the biodiversity on which its survival depends. The overshoot date, calculated by the Global Footprint Network, a think-tank, using data collected by the UN, has been coming earlier almost every year since 1971.

Rich countries, unsurprisingly, are the most profligate. A study published in 2022 in Lancet Planetary Health, a journal, found that America and the EU were respectively responsible for 27% and 25% of the overuse of natural resources. The global south was responsible for just 8%.

This is the kind of environmentalism — conservationalism — that we need. Not something abstract about substances humans can’t even detect without laboratory equipment.

We’re using more resources than the planet can replenish, and that’s catastrophic in an incredibly concrete way.