19th May 2023
Today marks the day when in the UK we have used up our year’s quota of the earth’s resources. After today our lifestyle is being lived on credit. Can we increase – through better care – the fruitfulness of the earth? Can we shift our way of life to a more sustainable pattern?
For more information about Earth Overshoot day see https://greentau.org/2023/05/13/green-tau-issue-69/
Earth Overshoot Day
13th May 2023
If I had a capital sum of £10,000 that provided me with an income of £1000 a year and provided my annual expenditure did not exceed £1000, I would be set up for life.
If however I spent £1500 a year, whilst I would not have a problem in the short term, I would in the long term. For to have £1500 to spend I would have to use £500 from my capital which would be fine in the first year. In the second year however my income would be only £950 because the capital driving it had been reduced. I would either have to curtail my living expenses or if I was less wise, extract more from the capital. If in year 2 my expenditure was still £1500, then in the following year my income would be further reduced £895. To maintain my expenditure at £1500 I would have to extract £650 from my capital sum, reducing it still further to £8905. In less than 20 years I would be bankrupt.
We are in the same situation here on earth. The earth represents our capital sum. Each year the earth produces resources (crops, minerals, clean air and water plus the ability to absorb unwanted pollutants) which is our income. If we live within our income then our lifestyles are sustainable. If we live beyond our means, drawing down capital as well as income, then we are heading towards bankruptcy.
Since the 1970s scientists at the Global Footprint Network have been calculating how much of the earth’s resources we are using. For millennia our human consumption of resources to feed and clothe ourselves, to build homes and cities, to travel and pursue leisure habits, has been well within the capacity of the earth’s resources. However since the early 1970s this has ceased to be so. We have so increased our consumption that we are eating into the earth’s capital reserves. As of 2022, we would require 1.75 worlds to satisfy our global needs. We don’t have any spare worlds, so we are, year on year, sinking further into the red.
Each year the Global Footprint Network calculates the day on which we will have consumed our full quota of available resources. This is known as Earth Overshoot Day. In 1971 Earth Overshoot Day was 25th December. In 2022 it was 28th July. The only year when the date when into reverse was in 2020 during the Covid pandemic when Earth Overshoot Day was 22nd August – which at least shows we can make a positive impact if we choose.
As well as calculating Earth Overshoot Day for the whole world, the Global Footprint Network makes similar calculations of each country. Some countries don’t even consume their full quota, but of those that do, their individual Earth Overshoot Days vary from 21st December for Mali, 11th November for Egypt, 31st August for Mexico, 2nd June for China, 13th March for the USA, 10th February for Qatar.
And the UK? Our Earth Overshoot Day falls next week, on 19th May.
Globally and as individual countries we need to be adjusting our lifestyles to ensure that they are sustainable and at the same time, restoring the depleted parts of the planet – restoring the fertility of soils, improving biodiversity, increasing tree cover on land and kelp forests under the sea, cleaning up waterways and seas, and reducing green house gas emissions.
This will need system change across the world, but it is also something we can effect as individuals. To explore how you might reduce your environmental footprint try the Global Footprint Network’s calculator. By playing around with the answers you give, you may find ways in which you could comfortably make positive changes to your lifestyle.
28th July 2022
Today is Earth Overshoot Day 2022, the day by when we have consumed as much as the earth can replenish. What we consume here on after will deplete the ever growing deficit of the earth’s resources. We are living on borrowed time.
Earth Overshoot Day 28th July 2022
Leviticus 25 explains that the land should have a sabbath rest every seventh year. In that year no crops would be sown and the people would live off the surplus of previous years. Farmers over the millennia have learnt that you cannot constantly expect the land to keep on producing crops year on year without fail. The land either needs to lay fallow (rest), or it needs to be sown with a restorative crop such as nitrogen fixing beans or clover, or it needs the input of artificial fertilisers, so that it may recuperate its productivity. It is a lesson we are sometimes reluctant to heed. The Dust Bowl disaster of 1930s in the USA destroyed vast acres of farm land because farming practices did not maintain the fertility of the soil. An equivalent story can be told about the Aral Sea. This inland lake, once the fourth largest area of fresh water in the world, has been reduced to nothing because more water has been extracted year on year – to irrigate local cotton crops – than the rate at which water flowing in fills the lake.
Ideally what we consume from the natural world – crops, timber, drinking water, clean air, energy – is balanced by the earth’s ability to regenerate. Prior to 1970 that was the case. Since then we have been using up the earth’s renewable resources at a rate faster than they are replenished. Scientists each year calculate that point when we pass from credit to deficit. This is called Earth Overshoot Day. This year the predicted date is 28th July. Seven months into the year and we have already – globally – consumed as much as the earth can replenish in one year!
Surely this state of affairs can not continue? What can we do about it and why aren’t we doing it?
Since 1970, Earth Overshoot Day has been falling earlier and earlier each year. Only in 2020 did it reverse: the reduction in world wide consumption because of Covid gave the earth a three week reprieve. Consuming less has to be the answer which means consuming more carefully and more sustainably. If we could do that in 2020 whilst coping with a pandemic, surely we could do it every year?
The Earth Overshoot website has details of various ways in which the global community could do this. https://www.overshootday.org/ Meantime we as individuals can make changes to our own lives and patterns of consumption. And we can ask or push for our churches, places of work, sports clubs, local authorities, museums, retailers, and government, to make similar reductions in consumption. We need change to happen at all levels.
28th July is 2022’s Earth Overshoot Day at the global level. That date is the average of each nation’s own Overshoot Day. These dates range from 20th December for Jamaica (ie Jamaica pretty much balances its books, consuming only slightly more than it can regenerate in a year) to 10th February for Qatar. The UK’s Overshoot Day was 19th May. We would need three United Kingdom’s to satisfy our current consumption levels, whereas in reality we rely on other countries to help make up the shortfall.
Not only should we be addressing the conservation and safe use of resources here in the UK, we should also be offering support to those other countries on whom we rely to ensure we don’t deplete their resources and rather enable them to develop economies that benefit their own ecosystems.
6th June 2022
The Cambridge Dictionary defines sustainability as ‘the quality of causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time.’ Earth Overshoot Day marks the critical point each year when we have consumed that sum of resources that can be replenished in the course of the year. Beyond that point we are consuming more than can be replaced and are therefore indelibly damaging the environment. Last year Earth Overshoot Day fell on 21st July: in seven months we had consumed a year’s worth of resources! The situation can be worse if we look at our individual countries: Earth Overshoot Day for the UK this year was 19th May. Sustainable living for most of us has to focus on consuming less.
22nd February 2022
What is a circular economy?
It is easier to describe its opposite. A non circular economy is that takes, makes and throws away. For example, chop down a tree, make its wood into a sheet of paper and then, after a single use, throw the paper away. Another example would be taking oil out of the ground, making it into a plastic cup and then, after a single use, throwing it away.
In a circular economy the ‘throw away’ section is discarded. Instead the product is reused or recycled or repurposed so that its value is not lost. In a circular economy the sheet of paper after its initial use, may be reused (writing on the back of it), possible repurposed (used to wrap a parcel) and then recycled. Being recycled the waste paper may become a fresh sheet of (recycled) paper. Going back into the economy that sheet of paper can be recycled 6 or so times before the fibres become too short. At that point the sheet of paper might be recycled as a lower grade material and become a paper bag, a news paper, a cardboard box etc. Ultimately this paper based waste product can be composted and its nutrients returned to the soil.
In a circular economy the intention is not only to ensure the reuse of waste material (really it is not waste but ‘raw’ material) but also to ensure that there is no waste of energy and water. Recycling paper uses about 70% less energy and water than making virgin paper and produces about 70% less air pollution. If the paper mill has solar panels, say, it operate with zero loss of energy. If it can clean, reuse and/ or return its water to the water system, it can operate without loss to the water system.
A circular economy seeks to regenerate natural resources. In the case of paper this would be planting and maintaining woodland to ensure supplies of wood for future generations who wish to make and use paper. Not all resources can be regenerated. Once fossil oil has been extracted from the earth, more cannot be generated. Oil was created 300 million years ago when climatic conditions were particularly suitable for its formation. The formation itself took place over 200 million years during which time climatic conditions were again suitable. Oil is finite resource.
Is the rate at which we using the earth’s resources sustainable? Bluntly, no! If we compare the amount of resources we use each year against the rate at which those resources can be replaced, then we have not been living within our means since 1970. Each year the Global Footprint Network calculates the resources we use against the capacity of the earth to regenerate its resources and pin points that day in which the two coincide. In 1970 that date was 31st December. Since then this date – Earth Overshoot Day – has rapidly receded global consumption has exceeded the rate of regeneration. In 2021, it fell on July 29. Our current lifestyle is unsustainable. Moving to a circular economy is one way of addressing this problem.
The development of a circular economy, both globally and locally, is happening. We see it in recycling schemes where plastic bottles are collected, processed and remade into new bottles. We see it with clothing manufacturers where clothes no longer required by the user are returned and either re sold or recycled to create new cloth. There are schemes which reuse and repurpose old furniture. There are even companies that reuse and repurpose unwanted kitchen units. Some projects are small, others large but they are all a step in the right direction. As consumers we need to step up and activity choose to be part of the circular economy.
Further reading: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/06/what-circular-economy
Inheritance and Greed
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
So begins the conversation that leads to Jesus’s parable about the greedy farmer.
Is it that the brother has kept all the inheritance for himself? Or maybe has palmed off his sibling with a pittance? Maybe the inheritance was a house that could not easily be divided between two? Maybe it was a farm that might be uneconomic to run if halved in size?
Certainly for what ever reason, the sibling feels short changed and wants a fair share of the inheritance, indeed wants justice.
Jesus doesn’t ask for clarification, nor does he suggest ways in which the inheritance might be divided, or ways in which to engage the brother in talks about what might be a just and fair solution to the problem. Instead Jesus tells the sibling to be wary of greed – and not just any greed but “all kinds of greed.” Jesus then tells the crowd a parable.
There was once a rich and successful man – so successful that his annual harvest was more than his warehouse could hold. So the man tore down the first warehouse and built an even bigger one, assuring himself that with all this great wealth he would certainly be able to retire and enjoy the good life. And yet that night he died having failed to enjoy any of his gains.
I wonder what the sibling thought? How was this an adequate answer to what must have seemed a valid request? Did the sibling conclude that Jesus was criticising his brother for wanting to keep all the inheritance rather than sharing it? Or did the sibling sense Jesus saying that there were more important things in life than accumulating wealth and maybe especially so if it was inherited wealth for which one had perhaps not even worked?
What might this passage have to say to us as we wrestle with finding a just settlement of the climate crisis? Is there a global inheritance that needs to be divided? Is there a rich harvest being garnered that is more than one person’s need?
The natural wealth of the world is certainly something inherited by each generation. A rich inheritance of resources: lands, birds and animals, rivers and lakes full of drinking water, forests burgeoning with timber, minerals, numerous plants with which to feed ourselves and from which to create clothes and medicines, energy from the sun, irrigation from the rains, power from winds and thermal energy, a multitude of mini beasts that keep the solid rich and fertile, insects that pollinate crops, oceans that shift heat around the planet, and so on and so on. It is a vast wealth that should satisfy all our needs.
Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. in 2021 Earth Overshoot Day fell on 29th July. Since then we have as a global population been living beyond our means. We have been consuming resources faster than they can be replenished and instead have been accumulating excess waste, particularly of carbon dioxide. Something is wrong! And it’s wrong on two counts.
Firstly as a global population we cannot carry on living beyond our means. To do so leads to disaster. Or as Mr Micawber in ‘David Copperfield’ explains it: ‘Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds 19 shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds nought and six, result misery.’ For those of on earth in the 21st century the misery we face is most readily seen in the climate emergency: excess amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, is so markedly changing the climate that wild fires, floods, droughts, heat waves and storms that might be once in a life time events are now annual occurrences. The changing climate is simultaneously changing the landscape, expanding deserts, shrinking ice caps, shrinking the tundra, narrowing the temperate Alpine zone, draining river basins such as the Amazon and the Po, rising sea levels and the loss of islands and coastal lands. This misery is not limited to the climate but is also found in rapidly declining biodiversity of the planet. Over the last 40 years the world’s wild life population – animals, plants, birds etc – has declined by more than 60% and some 10-30% of all species now face imminent extinction. And in the declining availability of essential resources such as fresh drinking water.
On the second count, the overshoot is bad because its pain is not being shared equally across the global populace. For many of us in the west life remains safe, comfortable and affordable but for many more, especially those in the global south human life is extremely vulnerable and painful. In the UK we face from time to time shortages of items such as cauliflowers or potatoes, people elsewhere face life threatening shortages. In Ghana last year the staple crop of maize was 60% below average. This year heat waves in Bangladesh have destroyed about 20% of their staple rice harvest.
We should be hearing this as demand from our siblings to divide the world’s inheritance and to do so fairly.
Those of us currently enjoying western lifestyles need to reassess what we consume of the earth’s resources and undertake to consume less, and to share – to give – a greater proportion to the underprivileged. Such levelling up needs to take place both globally and nationally. Here in the UK in 2018, the richest fifth of the population had incomes 12 times that of the poorest fifth, whilst a quarter of all wealth is held by just 1% of the populace. Globally the richest 1% hold 43.4% of all wealth.
Unlike the rich man in Jesus’s parable, we do not see many of the rich and wealthy dying overnight. Rather we see them (and us) contributing the greater amount of carbon dioxide and other waste products that are the cause of climate change and biodiversity loss. It is not rich individuals who are dying unfulfilled. It is our global family that is dying prematurely and unfulfilled. If we did but live within our means and did so equitably across the globe, life would be richer and sweeter and peaceable.
This is the message that should be heard at COP26 and should be the model for the agreements made there. It is also be the message we individually should hear and act upon.
The Green Tau 