If You Still Love This Planet

While talking with Shop the Wild coordinator Holly Caine for our 5 Questions column this week, I couldn’t help think about how many natural resources are wasted in pursuit of those easiest to extract. In this particular case, we were talking about trees over other viable non-timber resources, but the same holds true across the globe, where demand for one resource always supersedes a more holistic approach to harnessing nature’s bounty.

This philosophy of depletion was further brought home by the fact that September 23 was Earth Overshoot Day—the day all new resources created by the planet this year were already consumed. Yep, we can’t even get through an entire year now without overconsuming on a global scale. According to the concerned folks at the Global Footprint Network, who have the admirable ambition of promoting a sustainable world economy, this means that for the remainder of 2008 we’ll be in “the ecological equivalent of deficit spending”—borrowing from future resource stocks in order to maintain today’s overconsumption habits.

You don’t need to draw parallels to the massive failures of those American financial institutions to appreciate what it means when your debt overshadows your income. Overspending is, after all, simply another of the “over” indulgences (overeating, overdrinking, overconsuming) that continue to play merry hell with our lives. Nature has a budget and the GFN would like to remind us that we’re overdrawn. Humanity, it seems, now demands the biological equivalent of 1.4 planets to survive and our collective ecological footprint—the demand on forests, cropland, pasture and fisheries—gets bigger each year.

By way of comparison, the first Earth Overshoot Day was December 31, 1986—the last day of that particular year. By 1995, it had shifted to November 21; by 2005, October 2. We’re currently more than three months shy of making it on our global budget and unless someone’s got one hell of a resource credit card tucked away, something’s gotta give. Personally, I’d rather it was our consumption habits than life on Earth as we know it.

Yes, there are more people on the planet each year, but resource consumption is also on the rise as emerging industrialized nations like China and India want their share of the retail dream . . . to say nothing of the land (and water) that continues to vanish at an alarming pace. We’re also emitting carbon faster than the planet can re-absorb it, says the GFN, with our collective carbon footprint having increased more than 700 percent since 1961. Fast-forward to 2050 when, according to U.N. projections, Earth Overshoot Day will arrive on July 1.

Perhaps it’s time for it to become a standard inclusion on calendars worldwide: Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Earth Overshoot Day. We could all celebrate by consuming less and caring that much more. Better an investment in our future than yet another cute greeting card. M