Today (August 2nd) is Earth Overshoot day. Not heard of this? It means that between January 1st and August 2nd our use of Earth’s resources is equivalent to what it can regenerate in a year. Our demand on nature exceed it’s biocapacity. Sadly, since 1971 this date has crept forward as we continue to live beyond the Earth’s capacity.

In recent years the only time that the overshoot day has crept back was in 2020 – reflecting the changing pace that the pandemic caused globally.

And you’ll not be surprised at all to learn that overshoot day is radically different across the planet.

Earth Overshoot day is part of a campaign to encourage people to think of the ‘power of possibility’. To explore ways in which we can reduce our consumption in areas such as regenerative farming, looking at food waste, our diet, transport . They talk of other ways such as 15 minute cities, and the problem of plastics. You can see the solutions and possibilties suggested here.

If you’re a regular reader of Lowimpact you’ll know that we are all about how we can learn to live in ways that are less damaging to nature; gain skills to provide for yourself, your family and friends, in short reduce the consumption of the Earth’s natural resources.

This site is full of ways that you can reduce the impact yourself and your community has on the planet. But, we know that is not enough. Overshoot day and their power of possibilities campaign completely fails to tackle the problem that is causing our constant consumption of precious finite resources: our constant striving for economic growth. We are tackling this problem at a community level, with the commons economy, – bringing essential infrastructure and resources into common ownership – we are sharing how we are trialling this (with our recent Stroud Commons blogposts) and ways to work within your community to develop this.

This is not uncontroversial, and we don’t shy away from debates here. There is a degrowth or green growth debate which is discussed here and a look at commmons housing here. What is clear however is that whatever we have been doing over the last thirty years has not worked, Earth Overshoot day continues to creep forwards, and if we are to tackle the constant overuse of the Earth’s resources we need to think bigger, and to tackle the root cause.