Overshoot

Overshoot means “to go further than the end of or past something, without intending to”. This year ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ was July 24th. Using the Overshoot formula humanity's resource consumption for the year “had already exceeded Earth’s capacity to regenerate” (footprintnetwork.org). Yet that has been the case for while now, since the experts began measuring (1971) getting worse in terms of Overshoot, a theory that eventually points to collapse. The collapse or “state of rapid decline” of many things, natural, societal, economic and political. Why? Because we are “beyond carrying capacity” of the Earth.

The day should be renamed and celebrated as ‘Earth Collapse Day’ — a global siren, about the disintegration and demise of our techno-industrial civilization itself.

Ecological Overshoot “is the phenomenon which occurs when the demands made on a natural ecosystem exceed its regenerative capacity. Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal” (Wikipedia definition). Less than 10% of the world’s population is currently aware of the above phenomenon, even less are actually concerned with such a global verdict, the exigency and not really exceeding any demands. The reasons for not being aware are different, as much as our real needs, concerns and fears — shaped together by many crises, material reality and phenomenon. As of now, Ecological Overshoot is still a matter for the experts and activists to “measure humanity's demand for and supply of natural resources and ecological services”.

Overshoot experts tell us about the “hockey stick” phenomenon based on human activities, over the last 150 years, the baseline taken as the 2nd Industrial Revolution. A spectacular rise of GHG emissions, population, pollution, urbanization, meat consumption, loss of biodiversity, ecosystem collapse, ocean warming, acidification, extinction rate, land use, extreme climate events, loss of ice and the list is long and preposterous — factors that are all exceeding the so called “Earth’s ecological budget.” Globally speaking, a phenomenon that has overwhelmed many of us, well as those who wish to theorize, model, propagate and impose “behavior scenarios” and a range of “sustainable solutions” upon billions of people, all living organisms, the entire planet if possible. Been going on for almost 50 years.

Why they wish to do so is not the concern here, as much as what all Overshoot and Ecological Overshoot discounts and by construct fails to address. Why such global frameworks are misleading, like many false “broad consensus” of the past. How Ecological Overshoot as a guiding principle however well meaning and scientific, is at the service of capitalism and it’s corresponding “Green Arithmetic” out to control and reform, all types of excess caused by modern humans. What about the Overshoot of capitalism? The divisive binary of ‘Society versus Nature’. The terrifying results of “infinite growth” that frames the “broad consensus” of “World-Ecology” eventually at the service and conservation of capitalism and hierarchy of race, class and gender.

What is “Global Ecological Debt”? According to the IPAT Equation (Carrying Capacity) “the continued over-exploitation of natural resources results in ever more severe damage to global ecosystems over time, this has destabilized many micro ecosystems causing increasing extinction rates and the macro ecosystems are coming under increasing pressure.” The “over-exploitation of natural resources” is most often related to the modes of production, and high-income groups disproportionately consume “natural resources” as well as “contribute to climate extremes worldwide” (Nature.com). It is a no-brainer that severe damage to global ecosystems over time has happened in reality because of the historical process, of capitalism, productivism and infinite economic growth, that has brought great benefits for a few at the cost of everyone else and the entire planet. By blaming the entire human population for such a global catastrophe and incoming collapse is a great disservice carried on by Overshoot experts and by very many “planetary managers” (Managing The Planet?)

“Since the 1970s the global population is increasingly compromising the Earth's ecosystem” (Global Footprint Network). The above verdict manages to create a global understanding albeit omitting certain fundamental conditions. Of capital accumulation, neoliberal economics and the infinite proliferation of technology and all it’s corresponding “demands” — three underlying drivers of the biosphere crisis as well as a range of disastrous outcomes now being confronted by us at varying levels. No nation can be an exception to the above zeitgeist.

The “Global Footprint Model” discounts the impact of capitalism, the actual “debt” and the eternal “Myth Of Cheap Nature”. That capitalism has finally run into it’s own Overshoot (and incoming collapse) and has effectively bankrupted the planet and the future for coming generations. To be clear, capitalism is “a way of organizing Nature” and not just an economic system or preferred form of “prosperity generation”. Capitalism’s governing conceit is deeply embedded within “World Ecology” — an utterly devious logic that it (capitalism) may do with Nature as it pleases, that “Nature is external and may be coded, quantified, and rationalized to serve economic growth, social development…” (Jason Moore, Capitalism In The Web Of Life). One affirmation signed by 96 economists, Nobel Prize laureates (1969 to 2024) about capitalism being able to achieve “higher good”. The same “higher good” that was ordained by rapid scientific discovery, standardization, mass production of the 2nd Industrial Revolution. A historic phase, that represents mass alienation of people, families and labor, starting in Europe, and then in North America, repeating like a pattern in every part of the world being industrialized (and standardized). The Overshoot of capital, mechanical power and western science.

“Individuals have the power to better their homes and communities… build resilience over time to combat the climate crisis.” (Overshoot, Footprint-network.org). The “power” of neoliberal affirmations also provides a range of solutions and reforms, such as Rewilding, Food Waste Management, Plant-Based Meals, Circular Companies, Recycling, Solar / Microgrids, Financing Decarbonization Projects, Land Stewardship, Indigenous Knowledge Systems etc etc. Is prescient here to understand that the wealthiest population groups, allover the world, have disproportionately influenced present-day climate change. Have disproportionately influenced world policies, world share and all it’s benefits, for a long while now. Call that category of people “1% or 10%” hardly changes the extreme inequality. “Link emissions inequality over the period 1985–2020… regional climate extremes using an emulator-based framework. We find that two-thirds (one-fifth) of warming is attributable to the wealthiest 10% (1%), meaning that individual contributions are 6.5 (20) times the average per capita contribution.” (Nature.com). Emissions from the wealthiest 10% based in the United States, Canada, Qatar, and China alone, led to a two- to threefold increase in heat extremes across vulnerable regions (2015-2020). They call it “Carbon Inequality” absolutely in-sync with every form of inequality within capitalism.

Overshoot of Exploitation. When we speak about or address labor exploitation, most often the narrative is based around factory workers, farmers, undocumented people, truckers, taxi-drivers, gig economy, etc. Yet, the exploitation of women by itself is a gigantic problem across the world, and perhaps no nation is an exemption. The exploitation of Nature and that of women is fundamental for the continuation of capitalism. Women cannot free their bodies or change their identities, unless they don’t challenge (and change) the material conditions of their very lives first. As feminists we all know that much. Leading feminist figure in Europe, Silvia Federici expands the material dialectic as “… the history of capitalism women have been subjected to a far more intense discipline than men. We saw that capitalism reached more deeply into our lives, appropriating not only our labor but our entire bodies. I refer to the state’s control over our reproductive capacity, over procreation, over our sexuality. This is because our reproductive capacity has been placed at the service of the reproduction of workers...” (Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: An Interview with Silvia Federici). No doubt, that a particular weight and resonance for those that have suffered most under this “global system” are women — disproportionately again those women situated in the global south, the poorest and the indigenous.

The science of Ecological Overshoot remains divorced from the underlying “social expectations” that are tied to a women’s role — a reproductive worker, as a person whose “social task” is to serve men in varying capacities. Such is the living reality of a vast number of women, except those who have achieved a higher ground, higher education and emancipation. Since the late 1960s, following many proletarian struggles, that included the rights of the decolonized, the indigenous and women across the world, questions of birth viz-a-viz population have been framed by a western bourgeois logic of performance and accumulation — and not by individual women or collective reasoning. Earth scientists, demographers, policy makers and ecologists began to speak of a “population explosion”, and the need for “population control.” The concern has also served to justify the existence of poverty in the midst of obscene private wealth accumulation, and to shift the blame from colonial exploitation, old and new, to the women of the world, “accused of producing too many children” (Caliban And The Witch, Silvia Federici).

Neo-Malthusian dread and all it’s capitalist tendencies are favored by a tiny group of people, almost all situated within the first-world, worst ecologies of fear nesting inside settler colonial societies. Deeply devoted to the capitalist logic of extraction, accumulation and conversion as the foundational logic of their society. Whatever Eco-hogwash and “in-depth studies” they may attribute to, in the name of Ecological Overshoot, is secondary and most often self-reinforcing. Is the very reason, as a science, Ecological Overshoot cannot achieve a global dialectic, bring people closer to Nature nor actually provide sustainability for all.

The psychology of collapse that frames Ecological Overshoot, leads us back to the underpinning “capitalist ideology and it’s irrational aspects”. Writer and scholar, Phil A. Neel, defines the phenomena or the mythos of collapse as an ideology, that returns periodically — we are on the edge of systemic collapse or catastrophic change. “Capital uses the mythos to reproduce itself. If we take the example of frontier colonialism, or the apocalyptic nuclear death, people fleeing persecution in the Middle Ages, religious groups and colonizers in the new world, they are driven by a common motivation, to find an end to their crisis, at the edge of the world… (Hellworld). Capitalism reinforces itself via crisis and “impending collapse”. According to the author, the class which invokes this type of “collapse catastrophism” is most often based in the West, folks often mobilized periodically under the same rhetoric of “history is on your side… god is on your side”.

Yet the complicity of patriarchy and capitalism is key, as a “background condition”. Population control, became a mantra first with the IMF, World Bank and range of policy makers directing capitalist systems of exploitation that “structures how women across nations and class may act and perform”. The Overshoot of exploitation, directed specifically at women is missing within every “calculation” of “resource exploitation”. Almost 50% of the world’s population (women) have been excluded from the “exploitation” and understood instead as a “resource”. For regeneration, indentured labor and even slavery!

An estimated 52 million people are living in situations of modern slavery on any given day in 2021, according to the estimates of ‘Modern Slavery’. Women numbering millions, based in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Niger, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, Kuwait, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and other nations, have been forced into slavery (and forced marriage) according to Walk Free (Global Slavery Index 2022). Like one cannot separate the economy from the environment, likewise one cannot separate inequality of gender from the inequality of wealth. What appears at the backdrop of population control and women’s reproductive rights, is control over the birth of new generations — of Africans, Latin Americans, Indians, Chinese, Caribbean etc, those very people fighting to reclaim the wealth that was taken away from their native regions, still at war with the ravenous demands of capitalism, the ruling class and it’s economies of extraction / destruction.

For all the forecasting and prediction, by the science of Overshoot it discounted the “organization of capitalism”. Ignored back then, by a range of earth scientists and systems thinkers, like Earth 2.0 (Jay Forrester), The Limits To Growth (Donella Meadows and the MIT Group), The Club Of Rome, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (William R. Catton), Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich) etc. World-Ecology and it’s praxis of Overshoot would remain devoted to the central tenets of capitalism and 1st-world economic imperialism. In a nutshell, “economic imperialism” can be understood as “new enclosures, where land is acquired by private corporations and trading agreements, following the same logic of enclosure of earlier centuries. Privatization of land, the destruction of the commons, always leads to many negative ecological and social changes.” (Federici). Hence, what about the Overshoot Of Enclosures that has gone unchecked for decades now on every continent? What do the planetary managers have to say about it? Actually nothing, and instead they are out to convince the world of some “planetary emergency”.

Federici reminds us that “the capitalist class wants to decide who can reproduce and who cannot, in the same way as they want to decide who can live and who must die”.

Overshoot of Wealth Accumulation. The 2022 Global Inequality Report provides many insights into rising wealth inequality allover the world. Post COVID, wealth gap between the richest and poorest got even more. Yet the same report does not dare mention the words “globalization” and “capitalism” — the primary reasons for all such irreversible inequality and rising destitution. “Wealth inequality ‘crisis’ or epidemic… as richest 1 percent account for half the world’s wealth” (Spencer Woodman). The utopian vision of a world, where so called individual freedom and “liberty for all guaranteed by an economy based on private property rights” has proven to be an absolute scam or at best yet another “broad consensus” of the past, now worth laughing at.

At best a “part” of the world’s population can check into a supermarket or an airport, while the upward flow of wealth and accumulation goes unchecked, guaranteed by all the hyper-deregulation and neoliberal markets of achievement. “Urbanization and capital accumulation go hand in hand” (David Harvey). Now that half of the world's populations live in cities, gives rise to not just population Overshoot and over-concentration of energy, resources, water and everything important but also major housing crisis, the homeless and abandonment. So questions of daily life in “environments constructed for the purpose(s) of capital accumulation” as the Overshoot of every megacity is a gigantic contradiction of capital accumulation itself. A source of conflict, economic failure and in certain cases civil war even!

The direct link between tax havens, tax cuts, rentier finance capitalism and globalization that has set off an “explosion in the wealth of the super-rich” (Forbes 2022) is sufficiently clear. While almost everyone wants to be rich and prosperous, the prospects of human well-being are diminishing at a global level. Adding to our list, the Overshoot of debt and the Overshoot of poverty. The wealthy who benefited from the global fortunes following the “2008 Crash” with wealth inequality rising across all regions, except for China where median wealth declined since 2017.

But the Overshoot Of Wealth includes billionaires who are Chinese, Russian, Indian, Australian, Nigerian, Egyptian, German, it’s multinational. Some people call them “moneyed psychopaths” and some prefer “the 1%” or worse “mobs with pitchforks are coming”. Eliminate them before they get down to eliminating us?

Yet far greater is the wealth and power of Fossil Capital. Global Warming is not so much an outcome of Ecological Overshoot but that of the “Overshoot of Fossil Capital” (Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up A Pipeline). Fossil energy based business and economies, or the major part of the organization of capitalism, that has gone totally unaccounted for, is also the “common devotion” of every major nation and corresponding political economy. The common devotion and means of wealth generation based on cheap energy, however seemingly different they may appear, the multi-polarity comes together, as one fossil-capital-based-system.

We hear a lot of good things about BRICS and a lot of bad things about the “West and it’s vampire capitalism”. How stupid, when both sides will collapse in a matter of days without Fossil Capital. Be it China or America, Canada or Venezuela, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Nigeria, Russia or Germany, the global north or the south, all hogtied to the economies and entire techno-industrial systems of Fossil Capital — energy that eventually is turned into the very “material Overshoot” complicit in destroying the biosphere and the lives of their own citizens. Funny but one cannot give up on transformation and they are “crystal clear” in their motivation as the new Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. But remember what happened with the “Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968-70)” ?! There are about 19,000 “ready” nuclear warheads in the world right now.

But even the Overshoot Of Wealth has to concur with limits, regardless if one wishes to “colonize Mars” (Elon Musk) or spray vaccines on food-crops (Bill Gates) or build “a golden dome” over their settler colonial project (Donald Trump). “I believe that all good things taken to an extreme get self-destructive, and that everything must evolve or die. This is true for capitalism.” (Bridgewater, world’s #1 hedgefund, managing over $125 billion in assets). Overshoot has no objective meaning for “a society of achievement”, the majority of people who wish to get rich, one way or another, and sooner the better. "Men Today Are Weak" - How To Master Power, Money, Influence & Reinvent Yourself, Patrick (Bet) David. “We are living in an era defined by a gaping and growing divide between the haves and have-nots” (Teresa Ghilarducci). Thousands of photos of various billionaires and political leaders standing together, punctuates the reality and the Overshoot of “numbers that tell the story of a deep divide between the elite and workers” (Seven Alarming Facts About Wealth Inequality: Bring On the Pitchforks?).

For billions of people, the persistent discrimination in every aspect of their lives cannot be resolved by peaceful reform or new mantras or just by stories of system change, not unless the “capitalist mode of production and its disastrous laws of motion” are eliminated altogether, as an organized response.

Back to measuring “Footprint Size” of Overshoot, is fraught with debate as well as limited to a set of factors, such as six mutually exclusive land-use types: cropland, grazing land, forest, fishing ground, built-up land, and the area of forest required to offset human carbon emissions (the carbon footprint). Worldly impacts, in terms of Overshoot, of social disruption, exodus, police violence, geopolitical conflicts, extreme climate events, economic crash etc have all been ignored. A rigid and practically useless theory confronts us in the name of Overshoot. “The interpretation is that humans are exceeding the regenerative capacity of Earth's ecosystems and therefore depleting stocks of natural capital, a state known as overshoot.” (Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy).

We all have read critiques of capitalism based on moral categories (evil, greedy capitalists versus impoverished, badly treated workers) or more recently, “environmentally callous capitalists” versus the ecologists, earth-scientists, angry teenagers, activists, concerned public and some politicians even. Moral and ethical objections remain, but secondary to the systemic problem of why and how to replace the existing modes of production and current inequality by some “other way” of meeting human wants and needs. For all and not just a few. We find little synchronicity between very many observations about the biosphere crisis and the coming future. “To think that modernity is an adequate way to deal with current complexity, I’m sorry but there is too much evidence that it isn’t adequate…” (Ruben Nelson, Foresight Canada).

The journal Science Progress in 2023, hypothesized that the environmental crises our planet faces today are the direct result of “the Human Behavioural Crisis” — with Ecological Overshoot driven by economic growth, marketing and Pronatalism (the social and institutional pressures to have children). Consequently it also provides recommendations, as a “concerted, multidisciplinary effort to target the populations and value levers, most likely to produce rapid global adoption of new consumption, reproduction and waste norms congruent with the survival of complex life on Earth.” This line of thought and it’s backing science treats “Human behavior” as both a problem and a solution. It discounts the impact of capitalism, modern technology and a globalized neoliberal culture, acting upon the average human being. Instead it emphasizes on the “role of marketing” or propaganda in promoting hyper-consumption and consequent Ecological Overshoot.

Yet there is nothing new here. Thousands of campaigns and reforms, rebranded in dozen of languages, have “shifted responsibility” onto the individual, the consumer, the aware citizen, the aspiring youth, the entire proletariat even. But “Behavior” is embedded within complexity — of social, cultural, economic, institutional and physical systems and not just “incentive structures” and “lifestyle changes” and “technological transitions”. At best, the ongoing energy transition would address a single symptom, of Ecological Overshoot, while every other destructive and irreversible impact of capitalism and the “globalized, extraction based economies of high income nations” (Nature.com) will go on as is.

Every year, the rich nations Overshoot their resources before poorer ones, according to GFN. The US, Australia, Denmark and Canada overshot in the beginning of March, while Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq and Ecuador don't overshoot until December. Given the broad influence and popular appeal of the Ecological Overshoot and Footprint, it’s measurement and underpinning assumptions are botched and fail to address the root cause, instead blaming all human beings the same, marked for Overshoot. To summarize a range of large-scale and complex phenomena surely entails simplifications, biases, errors, and gaps. And that said, Overshoot and Ecological Footprint, both are a poor representation of how badly we are “managing the planet” because a wide range of studies indicate that harm to Earth's ecosystems is already significant, irreversible and we know well as to what has caused it and who all continue to profit from the existing world-system.

Is Ecological Overshoot and Footprint good science? Perhaps, yet it does nothing to actually challenge or transition from the capitalist organization, exploitation and destruction of life on the planet. For that very reason, it has been embraced by a range of people, who prefer to quantify climate impacts, yet as “wealthy emitters” never compare themselves to the global average nor face the major negative impacts of capitalism. As yet…

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