It’s Only August and We’ve Used Up a Year’s Worth of Earth’s Resources – Here’s How You Can Do Better

With the planet’s population expected to increase to 10 billion by the year 2050, we desperately need to figure out how we’re going to provide enough food, water, and other vital resources for all of these people. But when you consider the alarming rate at which we’re currently burning through Earth’s resources – even with a much smaller global population – it becomes clear that there simply will not be enough left to go around by that point unless we make some major changes.

They say that recognizing an issue is the first step to fixing it, and this is certainly the case when it comes to solving our current conundrum of how to slow down the global usage of ecological resources. In an effort to encourage citizens of the world to take this problem seriously, Global Footprint Network, an international, non-profit research organization, has begun collecting data about annual global resource usage. Using this data, they calculate the day on which humanity has used as many resources as the planet can generate in the entire year, a grim annual “holiday” which they’ve designated Earth Overshoot Day.

This year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 1st. This means we’ve already maxed out our planet’s renewable resources for the year, and we’re only a little more than halfway through 2018. Further, in order to Support the highly unsustainable rate at which we’re currently exhausting our available resources, we’d need 1.7 Earths. Pretty unsettling, right?

In recent years, Earth Overshoot Day has been coming earlier and earlier. While every resident of the Earth is responsible for the exhaustion of natural resources in some capacity (we need food and water to survive, after all!), one’s individual lifestyle choices have a huge impact on how significant of a role they play.

For instance, eating meat and dairy greatly increases one’s contribution to ecological resource depletion since animal products require significantly more resources to produce than plant-based ones. Just how many resources does the detrimental animal agriculture industry use up? Well, it currently takes up more than half of the world’s arable land resources, uses the majority of our freshwater stores, and accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector. Not to mention the system is causing widespread air and water Pollution, rampant deforestation, and unprecedented levels of species extinction.

With this in mind, the Chinese government has set a goal to reduce meat consumption in the nation by 50 percent by 2030, a move which would decrease the country’s Ecological Footprint by over 126 million global hectares and move the date of Overshoot Day back 1.5 days. That alone would be a huge improvement, so just imagine what would happen if everyone on the planet gave up meat! The reality is, if we want to have a sustainable future and avoid running out of resources, dismantling the animal agriculture industry is not an option; it’s an absolute necessity.

Fortunately, with the plethora of plant-based options already available to us, we can easily feed the world’s growing population simply by redirecting human-edible crops, such as maize, from animals to humans. Seems like a no-brainer, but the sad truth is that Big Meat and Dairy will continue wreaking havoc on our planet and expending its natural resources at sky-high rates as long as there is a demand for animal products (and money to be made).

To learn how you can help put an end to the madness and secure a healthy, equitable future for all of Earth’s inhabitants just by making a few changes to your diet, check out the #EatForThePlanet book!

Image Source: Pixabay