It’s not just the warming, it’s also ecological overshoot.

Global heating poses a horrific challenge, but climate change is only one co-symptom of a much greater malaise. Explosive growth has propelled the human enterprise into a state of advanced ecological overshoot (EO) (Catton 1982, Rees 2023). EO exists when the human consumption of bioresources exceeds the regenerative capacity of our supporting ecosystems, and the production of wastes overwhelms their assimilative capacities. Co-symptoms include plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, the pollution of land air and water, contamination of food supplies, etc., etc.—all so-called ‘environmental’ problems.  When in overshoot, the world community can achieve further growth—and even just maintain itself—only by depleting essential natural capital and overtaxing the life-support functions of the ecosphere including the climate system, i.e. by destroying the biophysical basis of its own existence.

And that is precisely what we are doing. The global footprint network monitors the annual occurrence of ‘Earth Overshoot Day,’ the date in the year when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds nature’s budget (supply) for that year (GFN 2024). Each year, Overshoot Day occurs a little earlier as demand increases and eco-production declines with accelerating ecosystems degradation—in 2024, it fell on August 1. Remember, the difference between human demand and nature’s supply of even renewable resources can be made up only by depleting remaining natural capital stocks—fish stocks, forests, soil organic matter and nutrients, ground water, etc.—that took thousands of years to accumulate in nature, and by over-filling nature’s waste sinks.  (Even climate change is a waste-management issue—CO2 is the greatest waste by weight of industrial economies.)

Think about this for a moment.  Overshoot means that humanity is running an ecological deficit, a material deficit far more important than the fiscal deficits that preoccupy politicians.  Numerous recent analyses present the evidence that that urban civilisation is on track to experience a ‘ghastly’ future (e.g. Bradshaw et al. 2021; Fletcher et al 2024). Yet most politicians, like their constituents, have never heard of overshoot. Instead, popular interest swings with media attention among its various individual symptoms—climate change, micro-plastic pollution, falling sperm counts, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic—without connecting the dots.  The fact is that humans generally have great difficulty thinking in complex systems terms. This cognitive impairment is crucial because overshoot is the ultimate ecological meta-problem.

Well, that, but surely also the ability to stop impairment.

We can’t stop. We can tell this by considering the fact that we haven’t stopped and we aren’t stopping. We take the just one more minute Mom approach. We’ll stop, we’ll stop, we promise, we just need this one more car/trip/boat/house/plane. We’ll stop, but we’re not going to stop now, because nobody else is stopping now. We’ll stop, but everybody else has to stop too or forget it. We’ll stop if you stop. We’ll stop, maybe, but then again, we’re only going to be here a few more decades so how about if our kids stop, is that good enough?