Editor’s 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, Elisabeth Robson explains 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 solutions of “renewable” energy. Finally, she ends with three presentations on the same topic.
Bill Rees spent a good part of his career developing a tool called the ecological footprint analysis — 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 — meaning, we are using far more resources than can be regenerated by Earth, and producing far more waste than the Earth can assimilate.
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’ll run out of money. In ecological terms, eventually we’ll run out of easily-extractable resources and do so much damage from the pollution we’ve created, life-as-we-know-it will cease to exist.
I don’t like using the word “resources” 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’s 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 “resources” to represent living beings, ecosystems, and natural communities.
Whatever we call the stuff that fuels 8+ billion humans and the great big hungry beast that is industrial civilization, Bill’s analysis estimates our collective ecological footprint is currently running at about 1.75 Earth’s worth of it. Of course that use is unevenly distributed; as a North American, I am ashamed to say that I and my many neighbors on this continent have an ecological footprint 15–20 times bigger than the Earth could sustain if everyone lived like us. Many people on Earth still have ecological footprints far below what the Earth could sustain if everyone lived like them, so it all averages out to 1.75 Earths.
But wait! you might be saying; how can we be using more than one Earth’s worth of resources? Because we are drawing down those resources, like drawing down our savings account. Each year less is regenerated — fewer salmon and fewer trees for instance — more materials are gone forever, more toxic waste is polluting the environment. Eventually the savings account will be empty, and that’s when life-as-we-know-it ends for good.
A companion yardstick for measuring human overshoot of Earth’s carrying capacity is the planetary boundaries framework. This framework identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of the Earth system as a whole. The framework tracks by how much we’ve transgressed beyond a safe operating space for the nine processes: climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities such as micro plastics, endocrine disruptors, and organic pollutants.
Six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, and of those, five are in the high risk zone. By far the boundary we’ve transgressed furthest is biosphere integrity — much more so than climate change. This is perhaps not surprising given that humans and our livestock make up 96% of the weight of land mammals and wildlife a mere 4%, and that the accumulated weight of all human stuff on the planet now weighs more than all living beings — flora and fauna combined — on Earth.
I’m writing this as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) 28 is wrapping up in Dubai, UAE. There was a lot of talk about climate change and fossil fuels — mostly whether we will “phase down” or “phase out” our use of fossil fuels — and about so-called “renewables.” The conference ended with a global goal to “triple renewables and double energy efficiency.”
“We acted, we delivered,” claimed COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, as if building more industrial technologies, like wind turbines and solar panels, and making more energy efficient buildings and cars will somehow restore biosphere integrity; unpollute the water, land and air; regrow all the old-growth forests; unpave the wetlands; and reverse the 1000x-faster-than-normal rate we exterminating species on Earth.
The global focus on climate change, cemented by almost 30 years of UNFCCC conferences, has blinded the world to our true predicament — that is, ecological overshoot — of which climate change is just one of many symptoms. Organizations, governments, corporations, the media are all talking and talking about climate change and the supposed “solutions” of renewables and energy efficiency, while essentially ignoring the ongoing destruction of the natural world. I sometimes imagine them sitting around the large conference tables at the COP with their fingers in their ears singing la-la-la-la-la so as to tune out the natural world as she begs for mercy while they plan “green growth” and scheme to make sure none of the agreements will put a dent in any of their bank accounts.
Likewise, local governments, including the one where I live, are also entirely focused on climate change. Recent meetings, reports, policies, and plans in the county where I live reflect the carbon tunnel vision that is legislated from on high, including state laws mandating net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and “clean electricity” by 2045, and enforcing a market-based program to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
These state laws and others, as well as federal incentives such as the Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, put the focus squarely on carbon emissions. No other symptom of ecological overshoot has such clear cut, goal-oriented legislation as carbon emissions.
Carbon tunnel vision means other problems get short shrift. And the “solutions” that corporations are selling us in order to meet the goals set by federal and state law will actually make many of the other symptoms of ecological overshoot worse. Far worse.
Imagine the hockey-stick shaped graph of growth over the past 250 years or so. It doesn’t really matter what growth you’re measuring — population, the economy, average income, fertilizer use, nitrogen runoff, copper extraction— that graph is going steeply up.
My county’s planning documents assume that growth line will continue going up. Everywhere’s planning documents assume the same — that the economy, population, extraction, development, and consumption will continue growing. Indeed, an economy based on debt requires it for life-as-we-know-it to continue.
But this is simply not possible on a finite planet with finite resources and ecosystems already shattering under pressure. Basic laws of ecology tell us that when a species overshoots the regenerative capacity of its environment, that species will collapse. This is true for humans too. Our city, county, state, and federal policies do not reflect this reality in any way. This is shortsighted at best; a catastrophe at worst.
So why are most scientists, organizations, and governments so focused on climate change and carbon emissions? In part, because it’s relatively easy to measure. We’ve been measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958, and many other greenhouse gases almost as long. We can see the average annual parts per million increase every year. It’s much easier to measure CO2 ppm in the atmosphere than it is to count every last frog of a given species, or detect toxic pollutants in ground water, or track the decline of top soil, or do long term studies on the impacts of pesticides and herbicides.
Another answer to that question is that corporations have created technologies and industries they can sell to the world as “solutions” to climate change. These “solutions” allow corporations and the governments they influence to believe we can continue business-as-usual. The pervasive propaganda about these “solutions” allows us regular folk to believe we can continue life-as-we-know-it without having to worry too much because “someone’s doing something about climate change.”
Unlike the “solutions” to climate change that corporations are constantly trying to sell us, there is no profitable technology that will eliminate habitat loss, species extinctions, pollution, and deforestation. And so what we hear from organizations, governments, corporations, and the media is all climate change all the time, because someone’s making bank.
To try to break through the wall of all climate change all the time, I recently hosted a series of events on ecological overshoot. I invited everyone I could think of in my county who might have influence on county policy and planning in hopes of sparking the kinds of broader conversations I wish we were having. Few of those people showed up, perhaps unsurprisingly, so it seems unlikely those conversations will happen.
However, the three presentations — by Bill Rees, Jeremy Jiménez, and Max Wilbert — are excellent and well worth sharing with the broader community of people who are trying their best to start conversations about ecological overshoot.
I hope you enjoy these presentations as much as I did, and have better luck than I have at broaching these topics with people where you live.
Bill Rees
Jeremy Jiménez
Max Wilbert
Elisabeth Robson is an organizer in Deep Green Resistance. She is also actively engaged in the Protect Thacker Pass campaign.
I generally agree, with the exception of the following. Totally agree about obsessing on the climate crisis, mainly because it’s a SYMPTOM, not a root cause of any environment or ecological problems, and because the solutions are all phony and will cause even more harm (no such thing as “green” energy, etc.). No real environmentalist obsesses on the climate crisis, with the lone exception of people working in environmental organizations like Center for Biological Diversity who just work in that department. And even there, if they advocate any kind of “green” energy BS, they’re on the wrong track.
Framing this as overshoot is like calling other species “resources” or talking about “sustainability.” These are anthropocentric concerns and attitudes. Instead, this issue should be framed as the fact that humans are way out of ecological balance with the Earth, its ecosystems, our habitats, and our watersheds, and we have been ever since we started using agriculture, maybe ever since we moved out of tropical Africa. By framing this problem as “overshoot,” it makes people think that we should kill and take as much from the natural world as possible, instead of refraining from any of that except for what we need. Totally different attitudes that provide totally different results. It’s wrong in every way — morally, ethically, ecologically, etc. — to kill anyone we don’t eat, so our goal should be to live as lightly as possible, not to see how much killing and taking we can get away with.
Ocean acidification is a huge problem, as bad or worse than the climate crisis. An Australian study from about 20 years ago found that if humans continue to emit as much CO2 as we are now emitting, the oceans will devolve by 200 million years, leaving virtually no life except for jellyfish. Regardless of how far we’ve gone in that direction at this point, this problem should not be ignored by using a chart that shows that it’s not a problem yet. It certainly IS a problem, and a rather huge one.
Here in Canada our public radio station CBC one of the most listened to radio staions, pushes the green energy transition daily and even hourly. There is no explanation of how large open pit mines are “green”. Companies are doing extensive exploratory drilling for lithium in the James Bay region on the Canadian Shield. Mining of one of the largest deposits involves draining a lake. The average concentration is 2% lithium meaning 98 tons of tailings for 2 tones of lithium. Stock traders and hedge funds are rubbing their hands together looking at the money they will make. While the average Canadian understands the basics of global warming they have no idea what biodiversity is. The information people receive here keeps them in the dark on overshoot.
Thank you, Elisabeth, for this excellent, clearly-explained overview of ecological overshoot. Hopefully, more people will soon learn that our ecological footprints are much greater than just the carbon footprint. That Carbon Tunnel Vision illustration is fantastic! The three speaker videos at the end are also superb and I am very glad that you included those in your post, besides organizing that entire event. I shared this post on my Facebook page and I expect it to get a good number of views, but not as many as people’s posts of pictures of the food that they eat, of course. 🙂
A small group of us at Biodiversity for a Livable Climate (bio4climate.org) have struggled as you have with the term ‘resources’ as it implies a transactional relation. We recently came up with the term ‘valuables’ or ‘ecosystem value’ as better, though not perfect, terms within the system of extraction. This is only an incremental tweak in the language of the current system and will not by itself create awareness or a paradigm shift on its own.