Monday, August 07, 2017

Earth Overshoot Day

The Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humans’ annual demand on natural resources exceeds what our planet can regenerate or reproduce in one year, fell on 2 August this year. Yes, we had managed to use a year’s worth of resources injust seven months. This means we have used and consumed more trees, fish and water than can be regenerated over the entire year and emitted more carbon than what the forests and oceans are able to absorb.

The Global Footprint Network calculates each year’s Overshoot Day and according to the calculations, we’re using the resources of 1.7 planets every year. The equation has four main factors: how much we consume; how efficiently products are made; how many of us there are; and how much nature’s ecosystem is able to produce. The Overshoot Day and how many earths we need differ among countries as the pictures below show.






When will we ever wake up and acknowledge that global warming is real? When will we realise that our greed, insatiable appetite and unthinking ways are putting constraints on the environment? We are using more ecological resources than nature can possibly regenerate and this is putting the Earth on an unsustainable trajectory. We are demanding more from the Earth than it can produce. You can track what impact your own actions have on the world’s natural resources here.
  
I was at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel prayer room just last Saturday. As my usual practice, I went to the bathroom first before performing part of ablutions at the bathroom (the bathroom tap dispenses water automatically so I could control how much water I should use and not get my clothes wet as I’d be prone to do if performing ablutions at the prayer room. Of course I still had to wash my feet in the prayer room) before heading to the prayer room. There were two ladies who were there ahead of me and they took so long to perform ablutions that I had finished two sunat prayers and started on my Zuhor prayers before they were done with their ablutions. The taps were on full blast and I couldn’t help wondering at the gallons of water wasted and how they managed to keep their clothes dry. Was it necessary to waste so much water (and mind you, that was no isolated event)? In Mecca and Medinah, pilgrims are able to perform ablutions using only a small bottle of water so why do we use so much water here? Similarly, why do we use so much water to wash our cars and porch? Have we forgotten the drought days of El Niño when it got so bad that we had to live days where the tap water was switched off and only had hours to refill our containers and pails when the tap water was switched back on? It’s alarming how short our memories are!


It’s time we start changing our unsustainable ways of living. Educate our children and teach even our pets not to waste resources (I wince whenever I see video clips of cats playing with tap water). We are already living in deficit as it is. The worlds resource bank has gone into overdraft!