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Have you ever run out of money before running out of month? If not, pat yourself on the back. You know how to consistently manage your resources. For the rest of us, we borrow against our future ability to fill in the gaps, keep things flowing. What about running out of Earth before running out of year? We all do that.
So what happens now?
We go into debt, dig into nature’s future ability to regenerate what we take. More carbon emitted than can be absorbed, more topsoil eroded away than can be restored, more water pumped out of aquifers than can be recharged.
Current patterns of production and consumption externalize much of the actual cost, most notably the cost of depleting natural capital or biocapacity. Measuring ecological footprint against the biocapacity of an area determines ecological overshoot. Globally it takes the regenerative resource capacity of 1.7 Earth’s to meet human demands.
Wackernagel laid the groundwork for the ecological footprint for his doctoral dissertation. The ecological footprint metric was further developed, the metric is the foundation for Earth Overshoot Day and, more importantly, Global Footprint Network’s ongoing collaboration with business leaders, countries, cities and regions, more than 70 global partners in all. GFN's work establishing its core database of "National Footprint Accounts" and their open-source public data platform demonstrates the collective self-interest in preserving natural capital.
“We’re trying to show two key things,” says Wackernagel:
First is understanding that, beyond the fossil fuels that now seem so crucial to our existence, the “ultimate resource” upon which humanity depends is Earth’s renewable capacity. The highest value is Earth’s ability to absorb carbon and renew itself. We call it the natural carbon cycle. Global Warming is a function of more carbon in the atmosphere than can be absorbed. Which is to say, the issue is not the carbon itself but our use of it.
Second, by looking at the world from the perspective of countries as farms, the “self-interest becomes more obvious,” Wackernagel says.
In other words, we are all, ultimately, tied to the land. A modern, industrialized, resource intensive country or economic sector’s ability to compete is weakened by diminishing biocapacity. Like a farmer's soil turning fallow.
"Countries in a world that uses more and more resources aren’t resource secure themselves, they put themselves more at risk,” Wackernagel says.
“It’s fundamentally linked to the self-interest of each nation and city to recognize the context and accordingly invest.”
Any economic entity - from individuals to nations and global economies - not fully and accurately assessing its costs eventually becomes overextended. Something has to give.
“I’m an engineer,” Wackernagel says (he earned his degree in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). “I believe in the possible… boosting a vision about hope, not the bad seed of despair.”
Calculating Earth Overshoot day isn't all that complex, says Wackernagel. What is complex, he says, is “how to solve it… because many people think it’s a tragedy.”
“In terms of building the bridge and winning everybody’s participation, we have to frame the conversation as an invitation, not as a lens. We need to have everybody’s success in mind. Not ‘you’re good or bad’ or whatever. The moral language can push people off.”
It’s like the story of one fish asking another, “how’s the water?” The other fish replies,”what the hell is water?” We are swimming in a world that is only “normal” to us: here, now (and even that is arguably not so normal anymore).
David Foster Wallace explains it best in This is Water:
“The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.”
Ecological footprint measures the “amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to produce all the resources a population consumes and to absorb its waste.
Formula: PB/EF X 365 = Earth Overshoot Day
where PB = planetary biocapacity and EF = ecological footprint
Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash; Infographic courtesy of the Global Footprint Network
Tom is the founder, editor, and publisher of GlobalWarmingisReal.com and the TDS Environmental Media Network. He has been a contributor for Triple Pundit since 2007. Tom has also written for Slate, Earth911, the Pepsico Foundation, Cleantechnia, Planetsave, and many other sustainability-focused publications. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists