Ecological Debt Day

As an Environmental Studies major (along with Urban Planning) I am fortunate enough to get a host of interesting emails every day from the program adviser, Tasha McVaugh Seegert. These emails range from upcoming Wasatch Community Gardens events, to new course offerings, to the occasional knitting tip. Today's subject line caught my attention - "Ecological Debt Day." Usually any sort of "[Environmental word] Day" consists of tree planting, or gathering recyclables, or some such activity. But the word "debt" popped out today.

According to the Global Footprint Network, today is the day that the we have used up all the natural resources the earth can provide in a year and are living in ecological debt. I will be the first person to question the methods used to reach that estimate, how do you figure out the actual resources used per year? how do you know we have passed that number? There are plenty of questions regarding that sort of figure. The statement that we are living in ecological debt is also as confusing to me as hearing about the multi-trillion dollar national debt. If we are in debt, where are the resources coming from? Who holds the note to all those trillions of dollars? Does a number that big really mean anything?

The Global Footprint Network, or any organization for that matter, would be hard pressed [I assume] to show hard numbers to back up that statement. Statements which encompass the entire world are too nebulous to be clearly defined in a sentence. But I do not think that is the point. The idea behind the statement is not flawed. The amount of resources in our closed system is far out paced by our consumption of those resources. Bottom line. I contribute to that. I eat thousand mile dinners, I drive a car, I live in a house that is cool in the summer and warm in the winter, so I hope this post does not sound accusatory.

So what is to be done? I will defer the answer to someone more educated, and eloquent, than I. Michael Pollin wrote an article a few months ago titled "Why Bother?" Our planet is getting smaller, oddly, that means our problems are getting bigger - much like the problem of homelessness from my last post. NPR reported that foreign banks are looking for a piece of the nearly 700 billion dollar bailout package proposed by the Bush administration, because the US economy is not just the US economy. We have our fingers in pies all over the world, and who knows how many countries have their fingers in our pie. Agri-business and auto companies have high paid lobbyists. So what are we, as individuals to do? Read the article, it's good.