Earth Overshoot Day

Reading time: 6 minutes
Key words: Climate change, environmental awareness, sustainability, ecological impact, global footprint

Today's blog is written by guest blogger Kaitlin Carlson.

Earth Overshoot Day

On August 1 2018, we, the collective citizens of Earth, had used up all of the ecological resources the planet could generate for us this year. Earth Overshoot Day passed without most of us (including myself) even knowing about it, and we continued on with business as usual - generating waste (the average Canadian generates 2.3kg of waste per DAY) and explicitly or implicitly contributing to other activities which simply aren’t sustainable.

Let me begin by providing some background on what Earth Overshoot Day really represents. It’s a metric calculated by the GlobalFootprint Network to give us an idea of how our consumption compares to earth’s production capacity using the following formula [1]:

Planet’s Biocapacity ÷ Humanity’s Ecological Footprint x 365 days = Earth Overshoot Day

Both biocapacity and ecological footprint are measured in terms of area (hectares). Biocapacity refers to the area of land and sea that is biologically productive and includes forests, grazing and crop lands, fishing grounds, and built-up land. Ecological footprint is a measure of the population’s demand for plant and animal-based food products, timber/forest products, space used for infrastructure, and forest area to offset carbon dioxide emissions (mainly from fossil fuel consumption).

In a sustainable world, Earth Overshoot Day would not exist - or at least it wouldn’t occur until December 31 of any given year. But, in the last five decades, we have consistently been hitting Earth Overshoot Day well before the end of the year. Here’s how Earth Overshoot Day has been trending since the 1970s [2].

Looks like we’ve been over-consuming for some time, and 2018 was our highest-consumption year yet - we maxed out our annual biocapacity with still five months left to go. This means that we would need 1.7 times the biocapacity of our earth just to break even. Since Earth currently does not import from other planets, this is troublesome.

There is no planet B (at least for now)! [3]

Earth Overshoot Day should give us cause for concern, and hopefully make us take action to make some serious changes. Beware though; there are well-founded criticisms of the use of Earth Overshoot Day as an indicator of our impact on the planet. The main criticism is that the calculation isn’t overly scientific. It turns out that each land use type included in the calculation is nearly balanced in biocapacity and ecological footprint except for carbon dioxide emissions [4]. What this means is that when the Earth Overshoot Day calculation tells us that we’ve consumed a year’s worth resources by August 1, it isn’t technically accurate. Rather, we've actually consumed a year’s worth of carbon, but we still have a surplus of the other resources to work with for the remainder of the year [5]. (If you want to calculate your individual carbon footprint, you might find this guide  interesting.)

On the surface this point might seem like a good thing; maybe our food production, deforestation, and construction is sustainable? (…That intuitively doesn’t seem right, does it?) The alternative solution is that the use of area (hectares) as a measurement of biocapacity or footprint must be an oversimplification. Critics argue that such a simple measure of our impact on the planet cannot capture the real consequences [6].

But, even if we accept it to be an oversimplification, Earth Overshoot Day is still a call to action that captures the attention of the public at large in terms all people can understand: we’re depleting the earth’s resources at an alarming rate. The Global Footprint Network’s #MovetheDate campaign puts the power in our hands to lessen our ecological debt to the earth. Let's see if we can collectively make changes in order to #movethedate for 2019! Calculate your ecological footprint and get ideas of how you can help move next year’s date by using this footprint tracker.

References

[1] Global Footprint Network, "Earth Overshoot Day," Global Footprint Network, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-days/. [Accessed 08 October 2018].

[2] mw238, "flickr," 29 November 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mw238/23400563466/. [Accessed 17 October 2018].

[3] R. B. Richardson, "Earth Overshoot Day May Seriously Underestimate Humanity's Ecological Footprint," ScienceAlert, 30 July 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-overshoot-day-may-seriously-underestimate-humanity-s-ecological-footprint. [Accessed 17 October 2018].

[4] B. W. Brook, E. C. Ellis, P. M. Kareiva, T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger, "Does the Shoe Fit? Real versus Imagined Ecological Footprints," PLOS Biology, 5 November 2013. [Online]. Available: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001700. [Accessed 17 October 2018]. 

[5] F. Pearce, "Admit it: we can’t measure our ecological footprint," New Scientist Ltd., 20 November 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029445-000-admit-it-we-cant-measure-our-ecological-footprint/. [Accessed 17 October 2018].

A Cultural and Spiritual Transformation

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I am still grappling with a succinct "reasons why humans hate/discriminate against/kill each other," but it is in this same vein that I am motivated to study religion/theology and its dynamic intersection with culture. We indeed need a cultural and spiritual transformation.

And, if you even glimpse at the news sporadically, you are more than aware of how much room for change there is in our many religious, political, educational, and cultural spheres. There is so much more room to love more widely and more deeply. I think all hands are needed in this--no matter your career/hobbies/skills/passions etc.--because each of us have our own ever-widening circles of influence where we can be more loving and encourage others to do the same.

And to those of us who are able to devote ourselves 'full time' to questions of religion and culture (I would place many students and scholars of religion more broadly in this category, as well as those in leadership positions of spiritual communities), well...... I hope we can find creative ways to use our insights and knowledge to evoke positive change.

p.s. please feel free to kick me in the pants whenever I (again) begin to fret more about trying to walk delicately on egg shells in some imagined-path to a tenure track job than I do about following my passion.

Goals and Prioritising + and Living Meaningfully

What are your goals for this next 12 months? (Is that a question you ever ask yourself?)

It’s a question I ask myself a lot—in various forms/time-lines. In fact, I am willing to entertain the possibility that I just may be too Type-A/task-driven ;).   I make goals for what I want to do on that particular day (or in that particular 50-minute period) and I usually also have a ~7 day, ~3 month, ~12 month, and ~3 year list of to-dos/goals either pinned to my bulletin board or just floating around somewhere in my mind. I feel immensely more calm when I have some sort of plan—preferably written out in a spreadsheet with colour-coding and hyperlinks J. I really like having a sense of where I might head, even if past experience has shown me that that almost always changes.

Now, I’m about to go to India for approximately one year of fieldwork (focused on interreligious relations and based at an ashram.) And, now knowing this ^ about my goal-orientedness, you can appreciate my feelings of chaos when the ashram estate manager informed me “you can come and stay for 2-3 months, but after that let’s see.” I felt like I was treading water and a big wave splashed me in the face; I gasped and choked a little bit.

At present, I plan to be in India for ~11 months. How was I to cope with this “stay for 2-3 months and then we’ll see”? If I wasn’t going to remain at that place, I wanted to at least write down on a piece of colour-coded paper where I thought I’d be for the remaining months.

And so, my type-A brain is doing the next-best thing. I am planning not WHERE I want to be for the next 12 months, but WHO I want to be. Another way of conceptualising this has been: what do I want to get out of the next 12 months? Yet another way has been: what do I want to focus my energy on and contribute to during the next 12 months?


Who do you want to be (or, perhaps, to become) in the next 12 months? (Is that a question you ever ask yourself?)



I continue to ask these sorts of questions while preparing to head to India because, over my multiple trips to India in the past ~4 years, India has become a place where I have allowed myself to explore these questions in a very real way. Of course, I pose them in other places too, but I seem to pose them especially whilst out of my "regular" routine--and a lot of this has happened to be in India.

Evening aarti on the Ganges river in Varanasi

I think these are important questions to think through. (And so I’ve made a list and colour coded them.) Just kidding. Or am I?

Here are some of the things I want to spend my time doing. (And yes, I note they are still in the form of a to-do list. You can’t completely strip me of my organisational tendencies..)

- learn Hindi
- try to play an Indian classical instrument. Maybe the sarod.
- be happy
- be involved in the community I find myself in
- gather enough data to write a good PhD thesis
- don't become consumed by getting enough data to write a good PhD thesis
- sketch and draw
- meditate lots
- learn to record good audio (my own songs? Bhakti bhajans?)
- become better at video shooting and editing; make short videos about life in the ashram and life in india
- live simply and sustainably (maybe get involved with some community-kitchen projects, or agriculture)
- appreciate small things; say ‘thank you’ more often
- become less judgmental and more compassionate
- learn local ways of doing things (sewing? agriculture? cooking?) that I do not currently know
- learn what people outside of academia think about God/religion/interreligious relations
- practice communicating my thoughts on ^ for people inside and outside of academia
- spend time outdoors; go hiking
- write poetry
- find creative ways to enter [non-academic] discussions about what it means to live meaningfully
- learn more about who/what God is

Sunshine in Croatia

Of course I do realise that some of these are a bit more ambiguous than others are…

Broadly speaking, I find that, all too readily, I become stressed out about planning details and striving for goals that—in the grand scheme of things—don’t really matter all that much. For example, writing my PhD thesis: this is a good and admirable goal, and I intend to focus on content that I think is important for a number of reasons…but as soon as this particular goal takes over my ability to be a loving friend/family member, a kind neighbour, or a compassionate stranger, I think I have to seriously question whether I have my priorities straight.

This is difficult because, for the most part, we live in societies that are career/results-driven. At least in my experience, careers (and steps towards improving our careers) are the one thing that people are almost bound to congratulate others on.

I had a sort-of “aha!” moment in this regard when I was accepted for my PhD. Around the same time, a friend of mine (who is extremely intelligent and could certainly have gone on to do a PhD had she wanted to) decided to take a short-term contract position. At this same time, she also chose to put off any imminent plan of doing a PhD so that she and her husband could start their family without worrying about PhD stresses. People congratulated me on my PhD. And people congratulated her on her contract work. But a number of people asked her why she wasn’t doing a PhD, and I think very few (if any) congratulated her on her decision to devote her time and energy to her future-kids, to her marriage, and to all the other ways she was now able to volunteer within her community.  Why is this?

Why is it that we automatically congratulate and praise things associated with “measurable intelligence” and (presumably) pay-checks, but we rarely think to congratulate or praise people who have chosen to live in a way that leaves a small carbon footprint, or who grow their own vegetables, or who volunteer at the soup kitchen, or who do any number of other things that are inarguable examples of love for their community around them and/or for the world in which we live.

Rocks and rivers in Vancouver, Canada

Priorities change with opportunities, and this is inexorably wrapped up in priviledge. I recognise that, and I recognise that I'm not addressing that here. But, with the opportunities (and yes, the priviledges and Priviledge) that I have, I think I must seriously question whether I am using my time, energies, and passion well. Am I choosing to live in ways that grow me into a more loving and compassionate person? Am I choosing things that make me happy---and doing so in a way that does not abuse or hurt others--rather than choosing things that make me (in the eyes of some) "successful"? What might our world look like if we all strived to become more focused on love, compassion, and service to others rather than on success, prestige, and wealth? (I've written out some thoughts on a related topic here)

All this to say, I want to keep my priorities in check. And I want to be someone whose schedule and goals reflects their theoretical priorities. And I want to be someone who tries to praise and encourage others who engage in intentional acts of loving kindness. How about you, who/what do you want to be? As always, feel free to comment below or PM me. 

Making Changes - for the environment, for others, and for me!

Over the last five years or so, with a big push in the last year, I have tried to reduce my waste and use natural, non-harmful products whenever possible. There are three broad reasons for why I’ve done this: the environment, animal rights, and my own personal health.

Let me expand…

1) For the ENVIRONMENT: On a global scale, human beings produce 2.6 trillion pounds of trash every year. That amount is unfathomable to me.  Studies from the world bank suggest that most of the waste is produced by countries that are “wealthier” (the OECD countries (34 in total) include the US, Canada, many European countries, and a number of other countries Canada, US, many Western European countries) produce more waste than countries that are considered less wealthy. Within any given country, these trends are replicated at a local level: upper-class individuals generally produce more waste than lower-class individuals.

(Note: ‘waste’ is anything that will end up in a landfill rather than being recycled/composted. This includes a heck of a lot of food packaging (and, unfortunately for many households, a lot of perfectly-compostable food), all your old electronics that don’t get recycled, and a number of other items).

2) For ANIMALS and 'animal rights': I realise that not everyone is in agreement on the degree of ‘rights’ that non-human animals ought to have.  (There’s an overview of the debate here) but I personally think it is crucial that we show more intentional respect and love for non-human beings. For me, this is based primarily on the grounds of compassion, but I think a lot of religious traditions actually ‘call’ their adherents to this. (Don’t get me started on the biblical grounds for this within a Christian context..! I've written about that here.)

3) For my own PERSONAL HEALTH: I want to live long and be healthy while I’m alive. I don’t want to put harmful chemicals in my body or on my skin. My own biggest shift has been in the food I eat and the cosmetics I use. As a result of beginning to make almost all my own cosmetics (see below) my bathroom could now be confused as a kitchen pantry; and I love it! A huge help in this regard has been recipes and tips by Wellness Mama. You can see her blog here

With these three motivators, I’ve tried to find creative, cost-effective ways to use natural products and limit the number of things I put into a trash bin. I’ve also tried to be kinder and more compassionate to other beings (humans and non-humans. Yes, this includes the creepy crawlies which make me squeamish.) 

Things I’m proud of having changed:
Maybe something on this list will inspire you to change something in your own life. None of these were that difficult of changes to make, and all were done while on a modest student budget.

- vegetarian since 2008

- I now make almost all of my own cosmetics out of all-natural ingredients, thereby eliminating the purchase of the following plastic-wrapped items: shampoo and conditioner, lotion, deodorant, toner, lip-balm, leg-wax (feel free to ask me for my recipes!)
- I started a compost bin in my back yard (shhhhh, don’t tell my college!) so to not throw compostables into the garbage
- buying about 90% of my clothing from second hand stores
- I tried my hand at making beeswax candles (taper candles and glass-jar candles)
- I now buy a substantial amount of my vegetables from an organic local veg farm
- I grow some of my own vegetables (kale, for the most part)
- 5+ years ago I switched from pads/tampons to the Diva Cup. I absolutely love it.
- VERY RARELY do I kill bugs when found in my house. I use the trap-and-release method.  Because if I were in someone’s house, I wouldn’t want to be squished.
- trying to slow down and enjoy the natural world a bit more. It may be selfish but it's certainly true that when I enjoy it, I care more about protecting and improving it.

Our earth is pretty fabulous.

Enjoying Earth

This is Two Years of Trash.
Photo taken from Trash is for Tosser's blog. Click here

But I’m still far from where I want to be in terms of making positive changes. There are so many people who inspire me to make even more changes. A recent inspiration has been the blog Trash is for Tossers who, over a full two-year period, Lauren (the author of Trash is for Tossers) can fit ALL of the trash she has produced into a small mason jar. That is incredible and inspirational!

Here are some of the things I still want to change. This list is far from exhaustive..

Things I still want to change:
- eliminate/reduce dairy from my diet for environmental purposes (or at least ensure my current cheese consumption…and yes my dairy intake is essentially just cheese…comes from ‘happy cows’)
- eliminate/reduce all foods that come in pre-wrapped plastic (my biggest vices include: bags of frozen berries; nuts/pasta/rice/lentils in that plastic wrap; chocolate bars; buying bulk veg & fruits from Asda online which automatically means they put the veg in plastic bags in order to weigh it; “bulk bags” at produce stores [3 peppers in one pre-made bag cost proportionately less than buying 3 single peppers, etc.]
- I’m a sucker for candles, and I suspect that the thin metal of tea-light candles is not enviro-friendly. I want to change that.  Especially seeing as I know how to make beeswax candles……hmmmm.
- participate in reducing the inadvertent waste of public edibles (i.e. go foraging for food more often!)
- all Tupperware as glass or metal + cloth bags
- I love trying new arts and crafts and having different projects on the go. I would like to try to make these as sustainable as possibly by using enviro-friendly materials. (Natural paints? On wood? Rather than i.e. acrylic on canvas)
- I buy a lot of things online and the shipping packaging is usually quite bad
- reduce air travel
- solar energy

TAKE A MOMENT TO REFLECT:

What are some things that you have changed that you are proud of?

What are some things that you still want to change?

What are some of your reasons for either of the above?