We all know the feeling of living beyond our means: that big night on the town on July 30th was one we’ll remember for weeks, but can send us into crisis on August 1st when the rent is due. We wind up going into debt to maintain our lifestyles, a cycle that can lead us further into crisis.
For the past 50 years years, we’ve been in an ecological debt cycle. We routinely “spend” more than nature provides us on an annual basis. How do we know this? The Global Footprint Network draws an annual calculation: “Earth Overshoot Day is computed by dividing the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of ecological resources Earth is able to generate that year) by humanity’s Ecological Footprint (humanity’s demand for that year), and multiplying by 365, the number of days in a year.”
This year, earth’s rent is due today, August 2nd. And we are not at all ready to pay up: in fact, most of us didn’t even know this bill was sitting in our mailbox.
Why does this bill take us by surprise? In the case of our rent on earth, we often fail to understand what the true cost actually is. Living in balance with the Earth sounds good in theory, but finding a path to that reality in the layers of moral complexity markets task us with is nearly impossible. Most of us are also too removed from the ecological pillars that hold us up to grasp how much we need to live. We may hear, for instance, that a simple cheeseburger can take 700 gallons of water to bring to your table. But even that’s divorced from the context of that cow’s life, where and how her feed was grown, what those fields replaced.Many of our best minds turn to models when the world resists simple understandings. Like the evolving atomic model or Solow-Swan growth model, Earth Overshoot Day attempts to establish a rough idea of when humanity exceeds the Earth’s enormous capacity to provide for us each year.Put another way, if we (humanity) were living month to month, and the Earth’s ecology was our bank account, we’d make it to about the 17th of the month before we’d need to turn to borrowing. If that sounds grim, that’s because it very much is.
Luckily, there’s reason to believe we can get our ecological bills back on track. The Global Footprint Network – the organization that calculates the date each year — provides ideas for approachable solutions that can help us move the date back. Just as there’s no one overwhelming source of greenhouse gasses, there’s no one way to fix it. Instead, the GFN lists direct changes to help us imagine a debt-free world:
1. Work to reduce food waste
More than a third of all food grown winds up in the trash. Buying into a CSA, getting “ugly food,” and buying less as well as smaller portions can all help. Addressing this could move the Earth Overshoot Date by two weeks.
2. Move towards a more plant-based diet
On top of simple waste from throwing out food or letting it decay, we feed our food a lot of our food. Depending on how they are fed, animals can take more than a dozen times as much land to sustain the same number of people, to say nothing of the direct emissions of the livestock itself. People often think this means going full vegetarian, but it can be as simple as cutting meat a day or two a week to start and being more conscious of the practices associated with the meat we do eat (for example, by sourcing from farms that use Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge). Walking into your grocery store, look for beef that’s been sustainably grazed; that alone could move the date by five days. Switching meat that’s less taxing on the environment (subbing fish or chicken for beef or pork) can be even more impactful.Addressing a few key elements like food waste and going with sustainable meat and dairy (or even vegetarian or vegan options) would move the date by almost three additional weeks.
3. Nurture nature in your area
Reforestation and, especially, preservation of existing old-growth forests is essential. Study after study shows that old growth simply cannot be regrown. Preserving oceans is also vital. We are only now coming to understand the basics of some deep-sea life or the intricacies of cetacean intelligence. We could not begin to imagine what would be lost if the current trajectory is allowed to continue. Reforesting 800 million acres would move the date by more than a week.
That’s about two Alaskas of forests we’d need to regrow, which is surprisingly achievable, particularly with ITEK. Protected oceans would have a much larger impact, being a notably much larger share of the area of Earth and biodiversity.
Not everyone can be so intimately involved in rewilding land, but even basic concessions in cities can have huge impacts on our health and safety – giving us more energy and resilience to find other ways to make changes.
The city of Los Angeles has one of (perhaps even the largest) urban forestry departments in the world. As temperatures rise and more people move into cities, urban forests will be critical to keeping people safe by dropping the mercury in urban heat islands and can help care for our collective well-being. We need to convert parking garages and reclaim streets to be more human-focused, but the potential boons are enormous.
4. Push local leaders to build and design sustainably
This one is deceptively simple, and in the coming decades, we’re likely to see some big changes to how work is done and where people live. To start, it’s estimated that 80% of all human beings will live in a city by 2050. That means how we design and organize our cities is critical. American-style development would be catastrophic, requiring exponentially more pavement in a vain attempt to solve the geometry problem posed by packing and moving millions of cars around a city. Provided that you can, biking to work half the time or using high-efficiency public transit like intercity or commuter rail can save the CO2 of dozens of car trips. Even so, half the greenhouse emissions from the lifespan of a car come from its creation. Building more sustainable cities coil dramatically cut the need for cars to begin with. But that’s going to take work from cities first. People can’t be expected to take public transit until it gets the ridership to be decent. We need to be clear with our goals and effective with our planning.
These are just a few examples: Positive externalities abound in ecological policy. One of the most potent tools is returning land to Indigenous hands. This typically comes with the reapplication of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK), which is tied to staggering recoveries of native flora and fauna. There’s so much room to be creative and generative: harnessing the resources that will help us pay our ecological debt.
5. Tackling Carbon
There’s no way around it. The science is overwhelming. Our carbon emissions are almost two-thirds of our total ecological burden on the planet. What may be comforting, though, is that implementing existing, off-the-shelf technology could move the date by 21 days, and financing decarbonization through banks like Atmos would move it another 22 days. Carbon pricing, which impacts a lot of other sections on the list (beef would become more expensive, for instance), could move it 63 days on its own.
6. What the Problem For Sure is Not: Population Control
It’s essential to clarify that the core problem is not overpopulation. It is inarguable that the number of human beings who live on Earth does place a pretty sizable strain on the planet, but not everyone is living beyond their means. For the most part, our ecological buckling stems from the hyper-wealthy and industrialized world.
That said, providing comprehensive reproductive education and resources to let people make their own choices about their future could move the date by 49 days – more than a month and a half.
Argentina hit its Overshoot Day on June 24th. China on June 2nd. The United States, Canada, and UAE, all shattered their targets on March 13. If everyone on Earth lived like Americans, we’d need at least six Earths to supply those resources. Forget bailing to Mars or colonizing the asteroid belt, we’d need a nearly unfathomable level of technology to cope with that kind of burden just in this solar system.
It’s frighteningly common for some to use the ecological stress of our time to blame the marginalized who, with very few exceptions, are not contributing significantly to ecological stress on the planet.
It is essential that talk about where people are living and what it takes to support them (manicured bright green lawns in Vegas come to mind), but that must never be used as an excuse to, for instance, demonize the poor of Vegas or anywhere else for trying to get by. It’s on those who have the privilege of making impactful choices to step up.
And we know this, at least in part, because in the past, we made different choices. More than half of all CO2 emissions were produced since 1990, and in 1973, we weren’t actually too far from having a balanced year, with the Overshoot Day landing on December 27. 50 years later, we’ve backslid and gotten four months behind on rent – with a landlord who is getting impatient.
While some of these strategies would overlap and likely reduce their total impact a bit, we don’t need to implement all of them — we can all the way to December 31st with just what’s listed here . But we do need to make big changes to how we manage our balance – and fast.
It’s not a matter of choice. Either we cut our planetary deficit, or the Earth will collect on its debt – with disasters, famines, and the collapse of wildlife populations. So keep checking your mailbox every month: we do indeed have a bill to pay.
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