Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday August 14 2015, @09:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the living-on-borrowed-time dept.

Earth Overshoot Day is the day when—according to estimates—the total combined consumption of all human activity on Earth in a year overtakes the planet's ability to generate those resources for that year.

How is it measured ? "It's quite simple," says Dr. Mathis Wackernagel of the think tank Global Footprint Network. "We look at all the resource demands of humanity that compete for space, like food, fiber, timber, et cetera, then we look at how much area is needed to provide those services and how much productive surface is available."

Here's his bottom line metaphor. Earth Overshoot Day is like the day you spend more than your salary for a year, only you are all humans and your salary is Earth's biocapacity. Ideally, Overshoot Day would come after December 31. It wasn't too far off in 1970, when it occurred on December 23. But Overshoot Day creep has kicked in ever since. August 13 is the earliest yet—four days ahead of last year's previous record.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150813-earth-overshoot-day-earlier/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:19AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:19AM (#223079) Journal

    I'm not being a blind optimist, but this kind of fearmongering and worrying overlooks a few facts. Malthus was terribly worried that population would overshoot, then crash catastrophically. Life has had this capability for billions of years. Population growth is exponential and given sufficient resources, will quickly fill all reachable space. Is the fossil record full of events in which overpopulation followed by devastating collapses happened? No? Or perhaps we haven't really looked for that in the evidence we have, and we would see it if we thought to look. But I think a more likely explanation is that such collapses have very seldom happened. Why?

    An easy argument is that a tendency to overpopulate makes a species less fit. Sure, such a species dominates during the good times, but when it ends and they collapse, they're easy prey for a replacement, easy to finish off. Just like the Moties in The Mote in God's Eye. So, I think life has evolved various self-limiting strategies. What are they? If there's research in that area, it hasn't gotten much attention. Too distasteful a subject for the other kind of optimist. We can hardly bear to talk about forcibly limiting everyone to an average of 2.1 children, consider that a moral outrage and infringement upon everyone's right to procreate without limit.

    It's possible that our technological advances have inadvertently disabled or removed some of our self-limiting behavior, that the unprecedented change we are bringing upon the Earth has upset some delicate but vital limit, and that we are indeed headed towards a Malthusian catastrophe. We really should better inform ourselves on this matter.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3