Ecological Debt Day (or Earth Overshoot Day), is the day of the year when our consumption of the Earth’s finite resources exceeds the planet’s ability to regenerate those resources in a given year. We just hit it on August 20th. So for the rest of the year we will be operating in the red – borrowing against our future ability to provide for our basic needs.

This, by the way, is the earliest Ecological Debt Day on record. The trend is clear:

Year Overshoot Date 1987 December 19 1990 December 7 1995 November 21 2000 November 1 2005 October 20 2008 September 23 2010 August 21 2013 August 20

The date is calculated by the following formula:

(World Biocapacity/World Ecological Footprint) x 365 = Ecological Debt Day

This trend shows exactly how disharmonious civilization on Earth has become (and how quickly). It only takes the simplest of common senses to see that we can’t keep this up and survive for long as a species.

Our civilization as we know it is propped up and maintained by a systematic education that trains us to serve it at all costs. To turn this trend around, we need a massive movement of grass roots re-education. Modern technology has enabled us to do this with unprecedented efficiency.

The (re)focus must be on the basic ethic that guides the way we design our systems. It is our critical responsibility to design these systems to serve the well-being of future generations.

Current education largely promotes a two-dimensional concept of human evolution. Growth is a line on a chart. So we press for more and more, a higher number and an upward arrow. It is a very basic tenet of our upbringing in the ‘developed’ world.

Nature, however, does not evolve two-dimensionally. It is a system not driven by quantity, but of quality. Its value system is based on energy efficiency. A species that cannot adapt its efficiency is simply replaced.

Our re-education must regard Nature as the great Teacher. It does not operate as a large linear system, but rather as an infinite number of small, cyclical systems that function interdependently. Survival is rooted in an ability to create mutually beneficial relationships. There are no exceptions to this basic law of Nature.

Up to now, humanity has clearly not created this mutually beneficial relationship required by nature to survive. If we fail to do so, the outcome is unquestionable.

We use a lot of resources trying to reform large systems – trying to turn a big lines into big circles. This does not produce the desired effect because it is inefficient. True energy efficiency is achieved by following nature – evolving small, circular and interdependent systems that one by one shrink that giant line into nonexistence.

TVP