Media Clipping — October 15, 2006, The Chronicle-Herald

The day we start eating planet Earth

By SILVER DONALD CAMERON

NO DOUBT it's just a coincidence that Overshoot Day 2006 happened to fall on Thanksgiving Day.

Overshoot Day marks the date at which human beings have consumed the entire production of the Earth for the whole year. It's the date on which we move into ecological overdraft.

"In any given year, if humanity eats more food than is grown, we need to dip into our food reserves," says Genuine Progress Index (GPI) Atlantic, the local sponsors of Overshoot Day.

"If trees are cut down faster than they grow back, then forests become smaller than the year before. If more fish are caught each year than spawn, there will be fewer fish in the sea. If more greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere than can be absorbed, then the effects of climate change, such as melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather patterns, will worsen."

That's the overshoot. If you think of the Earth as a capital asset, like a savings account, Overshoot Day marks the moment when you've spent all the interest the account has earned in a year, and are now spending the principal. If you don't learn to live within your means, you will eventually exhaust the principal, and go bankrupt.

Which is exactly what we're doing with the Earth. Overshoot Day in October means that the Earth now takes 15 months to produce what we consume in 12.

Overshoot Day was devised by the New Economics Foundation, a British environmental think-tank, as a dramatic way to express global ecological over-spending. (NEF refers to Overshoot Day as "the day humanity starts eating the planet.")

The idea grows out of the concept of an "ecological footprint" — the amount of productive land area, including cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries, required to supply current human consumption. If you add up the total productive area of the Earth's land and sea, and divide it by the number of people on Earth, you discover that the Earth currently provides 1.8 hectares per person. But at today's level of demand, human beings are using 2.8 hectares per person. That's the average human's ecological footprint.

The difference is the overshoot, and Overshoot Day is the exact date that human consumption begins to create its annual ecological deficit. Until 1987, the Earth as a whole had no overshoot. Humans consumed no more than the Earth could produce. In 1987, however, we consumed the year's production by Dec. 19, leaving us with a two-week overshoot. By 1995 — just eight years later — the date was Nov. 21. This year, it was Oct. 9. Thanksgiving Day.

Naturally, not all are equally responsible for the overshoot.

"More than 70 per cent of the world's population lives modestly and within sustainable limits," says GPI's director, Ron Colman. So "the greatest responsibility for reducing our global ecological deficit lies with the rich countries, whose high levels of consumption are primarily responsible for overshoot."

The wealthiest 20 per cent of the world's people — that's us, folks — account for 86 per cent of the world's consumption. We consume, for instance, 45 per cent of all meat and fish, 58 per cent of energy, 84 per cent of paper, and 87 per cent of vehicles. The poorest 20 per cent of the world's population accounts for only 1.3 per cent of global consumption.

"The fact that we are living beyond the capacity of the planet to support us is the most serious challenge facing humanity today," Colman says. "It is the ultimate cause of resource depletion, pollution, global warming, habitat destruction, and species extinctions."

And "if the whole world consumed at the same rate as Canadians do, Overshoot Day would be even earlier, around the end of March."

None of this is news. Five years ago, GPI Atlantic released a report on Nova Scotia's ecological footprint, showing that Canada's ecological footprint was 7.7 hectares per person. Nova Scotia's was 8.1 hectares; compared to 0.6 hectares for Bangladeshis, 1.3 for Africans, 1.8 for Asians, 12.2 for Americans, and 7.2 for OECD nations generally.

GPI proposed that we take steps to reduce our footprint to 7.0 hectares at once by a variety of fairly straight-forward steps — emphasizing public transport over private cars, for instance, insulating our houses, and producing more of our food locally. Such changes are neither difficult nor painful, and they strike right at the heart of the overall environmental crisis.

So why do we ignore them? The federal government kills the EnerGuide program, which helped citizens reduce their consumption of oil — though the province, commendably, now intends to re-introduce it. We propose to widen Halifax's Chebucto Road, making it easier to commute by car. We do nothing to stop the spread of low-density suburban monster homes.

Most important, our attitudes don't change. We still regard consumption as a badge of success, not as a symptom of social irresponsibility.

If that changed, if Overshoot Day began to fall later rather than earlier each year, we would truly have good reason for thankfulness at Thanksgiving.

Visit Silver Donald Cameron's website at www.silverdonaldcameron.ca

Copyright © 2006 Silver Donald Cameron