Econation Blog

"One way of illustrating our impact on the environment that brings a sense of perspective, comes from looking at the day in a typical calendar year when the world, in effect, starts overshooting its biocapacity and begins eating into its stock of natural resources.

The planet can tolerate a little give and take without environmental collapse as long as, in total, humanity lives within its overall ecological budget. The last year that humanity’s levels of resource use fell within the means of our life-supporting natural assets was 1987. As global consumption grows, the day each year when the world as a whole goes into ecological debt creeps ever earlier in the calendar year. In 1995 it was 21 November. By the turn of the millennium world ecological debt day had advanced to 1 November. In 2007, the world’s human population as a whole went into ecological debt on 6 October – two years on this has lurched forward 11 days to the 25 of September."