Yesterday was my 18th wedding anniversary. It’s been a heart-warming 18 years on the personal front with Marilyn. I’d marry her again tomorrow – assuming she’d have me.
The day before was less uplifting. Saturday was Ecological Debt Day.
That is the day humanity has consumed, for the year, all the resources of the planet that it should if the planet is to be sustainable – if we are to pass it on in the same state we inherited it.
From now on until 31 December, we are effectively over-consuming the planet, like locusts. We are drawing down on the planet’s resources at a faster pace than can be replenished. We’re exploiting the natural resource base faster than it can be replaced. We’re emitting waste faster than the planet can absorb it.
This started to occur in the 1980s. Since then, our ecological overshoot has grown. And Ecological Debt Day has crept forward on the annual calendar.
Bravo – for the neo-classical economic model.
There is an intensely moral issue here. We are making future life much more difficult, and less pleasant, for our children, and theirs. In our haste to provide for them, we have manically overdone it.
There is a spiritual dimension. We have become disconnected from Nature, and come to believe that we can dominate it, manipulate, bring it to its knees – under the sheer force of the human intellect.
And there is a social dimension. If we continue to fail to share, the future stress on the planet’s eroding resource base will ignite more conflict – which we cannot afford with our nuclear toys.
1992 was also the year of the Earth Summit in Rio, which I attended. In the 18 years since then, we have come to appreciate the gravity of the situation, but have not turned the national economic ships of state around, and seem utterly unable to turn the global economy around.
We have, at most, about 18 years left to do that.
We need to replace the neo-classical economic model with ecological economics. We’re working hard, here, to encourage our government to appreciate this.
We’ll keep on with that.
