Today, we’ve used up the resources our planet can regenerate for the year.
Anything we produce and consume for the rest of 2021 is stolen from Earth’s inheritance and our future.
Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.
And every year, our global Overshoot Day gets earlier and earlier, even with a pandemic grounding a lot of us.
You can calculate your personal Overshoot Day at @globalfootprintnetwork and the results may surprise you.
Even living close-to-zero waste, mine is August 9th this year! 😱
I barely buy anything, preferring secondhand. I don’t eat meat. I try and eat local. I stayed home A LOT.
But even if everyone lived a similar lifestyle, we would still consume 1.7 Earths on average per year.
This is because:
⚡️I live in a country with a power grid that is almost 90% fossil fuel based.
🚙I live in a city that is built for cars, not people; that is not conducive for walking, and has limited public transport connectivity.
🥒 I mostly eat food grown by an unsustainable industrial agricultural system.
We need collective and systemic change. The solutions already exist.
But, our lifestyle choices to live lower impact is also nothing to sneeze at.
For example, Malaysia’s Overshoot Day was on May 30th. Despite the system I live in, my lifestyle choices delayed mine to a WHOLE 2.5 months later to Aug 9th.
That is a significant difference!
It would be like us surviving 2.5 months longer in a 🧟♂️post-apocalyptic world because we didn’t stuff ourselves silly with cans of beans early on and run out by May ( did that make sense? 😝)
So we have to keep putting pressure on businesses, industry and the government to take action, while reducing waste and overconsumption in our personal life and communities.
It takes all of us.
How do you feel about Earth Overshoot Day?
#earthovershootday
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