{"id":66951,"date":"2024-03-11T09:42:08","date_gmt":"2024-03-11T14:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66951"},"modified":"2024-03-11T09:42:08","modified_gmt":"2024-03-11T14:42:08","slug":"why-are-we-not-talking-about-ecological-overshoot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66951","title":{"rendered":"Why Are We Not Talking About Ecological Overshoot?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why Are We Not Talking About Ecological Overshoot?<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"overshoot\"<\/div>\n

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Editor\u2019s Note<\/strong>: We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Something that should be a part of common sense is somehow lost in meaning among policymakers. In this piece,\u00a0Elisabeth Robson<\/a>\u00a0explains the concept of overshoot to explain just that. She also delves into how the major policy makers have ignored it in favor of focusing on climate change and proposing \u201csolutions\u201d of renewable energy. Finally, she ends with three presentations on the same topic.<\/p>\n

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By Elisabeth Robson\u00a0\/\u00a0Medium<\/a><\/div>\n
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Ecological Overshoot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bill Rees<\/a>\u00a0spent a good part of his career developing a tool called the ecological footprint analysis \u2014 a measurement of our collective footprint in terms of the natural resources humans use each year and the waste products we put back into the environment. His analysis showed that humanity is well into overshoot \u2014 meaning, we are using far more resources than can be regenerated by Earth, and producing far more waste than the Earth can assimilate.<\/p>\n

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Overshoot is like having a checking account and a savings account and using not only all the money in our checking account each year, but also drawing down our savings account. Everyone knows if we spend down our savings account, eventually we\u2019ll run out of money. In ecological terms, eventually we\u2019ll run out of easily-extractable resources and do so much damage from the pollution we\u2019ve created, life-as-we-know-it will cease to exist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t like using the word \u201cresources\u201d to describe the natural world, but it is a handy word to describe all the stuff we humans use from the natural world to keep ourselves alive and to maintain industrial civilization: whether that\u2019s oil, trees, water, broccoli, cows, lithium, phosphorus, or the countless other materials and living beings we kill, extract, process, refine, and consume to get through each and every day and keep the global economy humming. Please know that I wince each time I write \u201cresources\u201d to represent living beings, ecosystems, and natural communities.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Are We Not Talking About Ecological Overshoot? Editor\u2019s Note: We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Something that should be a part of common sense is somehow lost in meaning among policymakers. In this piece,\u00a0Elisabeth Robson\u00a0explains the concept of overshoot to explain just that. She also delves into how the major policy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34162,141,32765,33790,22093,34164,2327,2328,34163],"class_list":["post-66951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-biodiversity-habitat-destruction","tag-climate-change","tag-deep-green-resistance","tag-dgr","tag-ecological-overshoot","tag-elisabeth-robson","tag-finite-planet","tag-infinite-growth","tag-the-problem-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66952,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66951\/revisions\/66952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}