Earth Overshoot Day

I seem to spend more time writing little pieces on my Facebook page than I do here recently, so I decided to repeat here something I just posted there.

Today is Earth Overshoot Day (EOD).

Every year since the early 1970’s EOD has arrived a little earlier in the year. What does this mean? Well, if we imagine everything that the earth can produce in one full year for us all to use and live on to be like a jar of honey (nothing else, just a jar of honey), then we have already finished, scraped out and licked clean the jar for 2013 and we are not yet two thirds of the way through the year.

“OMG! WTF! What we gonna do?”

Well, pretty much what we have been doing for the last 40 years or so. We open up next year’s jar of honey.

“Yeah baby! Way to go! So we’re not fucked yet. Hoo-ray!”

Sorry to be a downer but here’s the thing. Every year since the early 1970s, EOD arrives a few days earlier in the year, partly because we already started the current year’s jar sometime the previous year and partly because every year we get a little hungrier as time goes by.

It was in 2010 that we reached the stage of eating all of that year’s jar plus half of next year’s jar.  I hope you can see that eventually we will get to eating all of next year’s jar of honey before the end of the current year.

When we reach that point in just a few years time, that will be the end of the line and, if nothing else bad happens before that time, that will be when the great human die-off begins.

Think about that for a minute or two.

For more on Earth Overshoot Day see The Global Footprint Network.