Overshoot day

Happy… 🤦‍♂️😒

Need literally means a necessity to protect the resources we cannot live without. Forests, marshes and mountain pastures must be seen as keys to our common welfare and protected from the hunt for capital.

Earth Overshoot day for Norway was 12 April in 2024. Norway’s share of the earth’s renewable natural resources is being used up at an ever-faster rate as long as consumption grows.

Data and estimates like these are quite often derided as alarmist. Yes, well, it’s alarming. If we think in terms of medical health, the world has received a serious cancer diagnosis, with regions approaching incurable conditions. Many island nations and low-lying areas are already disappearing. Soon, all the groundwater corals will die, ushering in unimaginable changes in coastal ecosystems and their food supply. Every half degree of warming is a deterioration, and not linearly, but exponentially. We increase our speed as we approach the abyss!

The horrific list translates into dire consequences for humans, including threats to food and water security, health risks and the spread of disease, loss of biodiversity (that is, the web of life we rely on), infrastructure collapse and “threat multipliers” that affect national security. These are the basic-level steps of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs: eating, drinking, breathing, and physical (and financial) security.

The most likely social consequences are harsh, as large parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Many cities and towns will be underwater or too hot to live in, leading to massive, destabilizing migrations of billions of people.

Need literally means the necessity to protect the resources we cannot live without. Forests and marshes, mountain pastures and animals, insects, soil and water. Slaughter of forests should be replaced by climate subsidies for the preservation of forests and biotypes, the reduction of topsoil and pasture should be replaced with subsidies for preservation based on ecosystem needs. Everyone who owns and takes care of nature should be rewarded accordingly while those who want to exploit and destroy our common capital to build their own wealth. Yes, I think we all know where they end up,  “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.