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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/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:50AM
Any time I hear any of these guilt-trip eco-doomsday news stories, I close the window / change the station / turn the page. I can appreciate that eco-guilt-trip-mongering is a core part of the National Geographic Society's mission, but I feel that their time would be better spent studying the world's past and present, because I already know that my generation is the last that will enjoy many relative lifestyle luxuries like internal-combustion-propelled personal vehicles, electricity, running water, and so on. They seem to expect the readers to "atone" for all of this by reverting to 19th-century society (well, in actuality, they want us to "atone" for it by donating to their non-profit organization, which will waste yet more time on guilt-trip articles, offsetting actual decent geographical journalism that used to be the cornerstone of the National Geographic). This is, of course, made under the premise that humanity would actually be able to revert the damage done by almost 200 years of industrialism.