On saturday, the world went into ecological debt, according to the Global Footprint Network. In other words, on October 6th, we used up the last of the earth’s resources for the year, and started consuming the earth itself.
Paul King of the Worldwide Fund for Nature explains it like this: ‘Like a savings account, the planet produces so much natural interest every year, and what we have to be doing if we were living sustainably is living off the interest; what we are doing is eating into the capital.’
For the rest of the year we are using up the earth’s renewable resources (pasture, forests, fish stocks etc) faster than they can be replenished.
We first overshot our resources in 1987, and ecological debt day gets closer every year. Collectively, we need the earth to be one third bigger than it is to meet all our needs.
The Earthbound Report 