August 8: Humans have used all the Earth’s resources for the year.
Known as “Earth Overshoot Day,” this year falling on August 8, the day marks the date that humans have withdrawn more natural capital than can be reproduced in a year.
“From carbon sinks to fisheries,” writes Sarah Emerson, per VICE News, “humanity has taken more from nature than it’s been able to reproduce. Quite simply, we’re in environmental debt. We’ve officially overspent nature’s resource budget, according to the Global Footprint Network, an international climate research organization. Metaphorically speaking, if Earth were a bank, we’d be in over our heads with overdraft fees.”
For the last 40 years, humans’ impact on Earth’s ability to generate renewable resources has grown. Our ecological footprint has become larger than ever—it is now less humanoid and more sasquatchian:
“Without fail, the Global Footprint Network says, Earth Overshoot Day has fallen earlier every year—between one to three days, on average, over the last four decades. Last year, it coincided with August 15,” writes Emerson. “Renewable resources such as crops, forests, and fishing grounds, as infinite as they might seem, are only as productive as we allow them to be. An ecosystem’s usefulness, also known as its ‘biocapacity,’ is fatally interconnected with our ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions. If these environments can’t absorb our carbon and waste, they’ll take longer to regenerate.”
Humans must find a way to live sustainably rather than draining the Earth of its life-giving natural resources at critical rates. Soon, if we don’t change, it won’t just be the arctic that will be feeling the heat—no one will be spared the effects of global warming. But there is hope, and, with new technologies, says Mathis Wackernagel, co-founder and CEO of Global Footprint Network, it is possible, and, perhaps, financially advantageous. Wackernagel says it’s in our hands—as a population, as a race—to solve this global issue.
The conversation of Climate Change today is of paramount importance: “I would say that [the UN’s annual climate change conference] is going to decide a thousand years of future in the oceans,” Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who recently authored a major study on the human-caused destruction of ocean fauna told VICE news.
Yet, whilst a “growing contingent within the scientific community argues that because of human influence on the air, water, and soil we are no longer living in the Holocene epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago with the end of the Ice Age, but are now in the Anthropocene — The Age of Humans”—per VICE news, some refuse to accept the glaring truth. Yes, Man has fucked the planet so badly that it’s entering a new epoch and many—funded by oil giants such as Exxon—refute the evidence.
Man is desperate, but without the collective actions of us all, we will not have a planet that is full of harmony—we must save our arctic, save our forests and save our future.
The Human Charge
And What We Can Do
The WWF attributes the death to a “network of interrelated human behaviors”—namely overfishing, aquafarming, island- and ocean-based tourism, pollution, climate change, and offshore drilling in the oceans (read more about offshore arctic drilling here). As all of these factors accelerate—largely due to an increased standard of living rather than new human needs—the unprecedented levels of carnage in our oceans will not cease to exist (“29 percent of the world’s fish stocks are classified as overfished and 61 percent as ‘fully exploited,’ meaning they have no ability to produce greater harvests”).
However, the oceans are not a lost hope: “‘If you stop taking the pieces out of these ocean civilizations, they can begin to rebuild themselves,’ he told VICE News. ‘It’s never going to regrow itself the way it was 50 years ago […] but we have to do what we can to stop the carnage and allow these systems the space to regrow.'”
“Marine species have declined by almost half over the last forty-five years, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index, and leading marine scientists tell VICE News that the only hope of stopping mass death in the oceans is to radically and quickly transform human behavior.
[…]
Fish were the most threatened, in large part because of human overfishing: Over a third of fish consumed by humans measured by the Living Planet Index are under threat of extinction, with one family of tuna and mackerel falling 74 percent between 1970 and 2010.
Other animals that recorded massive and ongoing losses were sharks and rays, of which one in four species is threatened with extinction, and some species of turtles, which declined by 97 percent in the Eastern Pacific.
The mass death of larger animals is tied to the decimation of habitats that are critical to the ocean’s biosphere. The WWF also noted that coral reefs — which support 25 percent of all marine life — could go extinct by 2050, and global surface areas of seagrass and mangroves, which provide spawning grounds, nutrients, and shelter for many animals, have declined precipitously.”
Save The Arctic — a Greenpeace project — states, “If you want to change the world, start at the top” — so let’s look North:
“The Arctic Ocean is home to incredible wildlife, from majestic polar bears to blubbery walruses, mysterious narwhals and graceful seabirds. But the sea ice they depend on is vanishing at a terrifying speed.
Without ice to hunt, rest, and breed, the very survival of polar bears and other wildlife is under threat. Mother polar bears, weak and starving, have trouble reproducing. Their cubs must fight the odds to survive into adulthood.
Unless we make a global concentrated effort to prevent this, experts warn that polar bears could disappear completely from the Arctic in the next 100 years. Act now to protect their home,” the mission declares.
The Human Cost
Why We Care
“See, you can ignore [climate change], but the thing about truth is, it can be denied—not avoided. So I’m sorry future generations: I’m sorry our footprint became a sinkhole, and not a garden; I’m sorry that we paid so much attention to ISIS, and very little to how fast the ice is melting in the Arctic. […] We are not apart form nature, we are a part OF nature; and to betray nature is to betray us, to save nature is to save us.”
Dear future generations: sorry. Sorry that we watched as our arctic—yes, our arctic—literally melted away before our eyes. Sorry we ignored the warnings.
And now, there’s more:
“It’s especially worrying because the Arctic is warming faster than nearly anywhere else on Earth. Now, along with melting sea ice and thawing permafrost, we have to add to our list of ‘feedback loop’ concerns that warming Arctic oceans may be releasing fonts of methane. That is, the warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum,” writes Brian Merchant, per VICE news.
“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he said. “We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place,” said Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and has been studying the Arctic for decades.
“I may escape a lot of this,” Box said, “but my daughter might not. She’s 3 years old.”
24 sponsors and counting—including mayors of two cities, Québec City and Montréal; the Quebec Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and the Fight against Climate Change; the Canadian Steamship Lines and other companies within Quebec and Canada in general—have signed on to the “Sponsor a Beluga” campaign for beluga whales. This will help pay for research of these “canaries of the sea,” so-named because they chirp and are very socially active.
“Beluga whales, those Arctic-dwelling canaries of the sea with their intricate series of chirps, are part of a fundraising campaign in eastern Canada. The St. Lawrence Beluga Project and the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals (GREMM) in late 2014 relaunched that campaign, Adopt a Beluga, to bring in funds for research on the animals in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec. So far, 24 of the small cetaceans have been sponsored, according to a release.”
Save The Arctic — a Greenpeace project — states, “If you want to change the world, start at the top” — so let’s look North:
“The Arctic Ocean is home to incredible wildlife, from majestic polar bears to blubbery walruses, mysterious narwhals and graceful seabirds. But the sea ice they depend on is vanishing at a terrifying speed.
Without ice to hunt, rest, and breed, the very survival of polar bears and other wildlife is under threat. Mother polar bears, weak and starving, have trouble reproducing. Their cubs must fight the odds to survive into adulthood.
Unless we make a global concentrated effort to prevent this, experts warn that polar bears could disappear completely from the Arctic in the next 100 years. Act now to protect their home,” the mission declares.
“About The Ocean Cleanup: The Ocean Cleanup develops technologies to extract, prevent, and intercept plastic pollution. The Ocean Cleanup’s goal is to fuel the world’s fight against oceanic plastic pollution by initiating the largest cleanup in history.”
Last week, the North Pole was warmer than Western Texas, Southern California, and parts of the Sahara.
Wait… what?
“This year’s holiday season has been full of extreme weather, with weird anomalies from coast to coast—like a script worthy of a Syfy network movie,” writes Eric Holthaus of Slate Magazine.
“The remarkable storm will briefly boost temperatures in the Arctic basin to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal—and the North Pole itself will be pushed above the freezing point, with temperatures perhaps as warm as 40 degrees.That’s absolutely terrifying and incredibly rare. Keep in mind: It’s late December and dark 24 hours a day at the North Pole right now. The typical average high temperature this time of year at the North Pole is about minus 15 to minus 20 degrees. To create temperatures warm enough to melt ice to exist in the dead of winter—some 50 or 60 degrees warmer than normal—is unthinkable.“
Inside Canada’s Anti-Pipeline Resistance Camp — A Gallery
Photos by RAFAL GERZAK for VICE News
“The Unist´ot´en Camp is located on unceded traditional Wet’suwet’en Territories in northern British Columbia and stands amid a high-profile oil and gas pipeline corridor. Over the summer, energy-industry helicopters had been landing there—without permission—to continue their survey work as heavy machinery cleared trees for a TransCanada pipeline right-of-way toward the Wedzin Kwah (Morice River). The purpose of this camp is to protect the land from several proposed pipelines that would run from the tar sands in Alberta and extracted shale gas projects in the Peace River Region out to the West Coast,” Gerzak writes.
“This oil company teaches kids about how environmental disasters can be good for tourism,” writes Michael Segalov of VICE News.
Though there’s a tendency for multinational energy corporations to invest in good causes (see: oil gargantuan BP’s longstanding deal with the Tate Galleries or Shell’s controversial climate change exhibition at the London Science Museum), Eni, Italy’s largest energy company, per Segalov, has taken a more skewed approach at reaching the masses.
According to Segalov, the energy behemoth runs an education program aiming to teach children about science called Eniscuola, or Eni schools. These programs are aimed not only for use at home, but also for teachers in the classroom.
“Educational materials from Eni include pieces of work designed for teachers explain how manmade objects like oil rigs and mining platforms have a positive impact on the environment and wildlife, basically arguing that Eni’s fossil fuel gluttony is basically doing us all a favor. A section translated from Italian as ‘life platform’ (‘vita in piattaforma‘) ‘aims to inform students on the richness of biodiversity in the Adriatic Sea, and the habitats that are created around the mining platforms‘” (per Segalov).
Unfortunately, Eni neglects to mention the harmful–often catastrophic–effects of offshore oil rigs and mining platforms in their controversial claims (see: the WWF, ORDC, and Ocean Conservation Research Center’s “Don’t Be A Buckethead” initiative).
“The scientific community is telling us if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable. That is a major crisis.”
Narwhals: Endangered Species 