You would have thought that an economic recession, which has slowed spending, raised unemployment and impacted trade, would have had a beneficial effect on humanity’s ecological footprint. But it has not.
The Consumption Explosion continues. Humanity’s footprint is still as large as ever. Today is “ecological debt day”, the day that humanity has used the quantity of natural resources that ought to last an entire year if used at a sustainable rate. It is just one day later than in 2008.
This counter-intuitive fact is stark illustration that new systems are needed if we wish to preserve nature, preserve our ecosystem, preserve our way of life, preserve our lives.
We face an ecological crisis of far greater consequences than the economic crisis, but we have done little to address the problem. In fact, we are ignoring it as we ignored the dysfunction in the world of finance. We are eating too much, burning too much fuel, polluting the land, air and water. We are destroying a paradise for a virtual world that doesn’t exist.
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