We are overpopulated. That’s the fact. With the current consumption speed, we broke far ago the threshold of resources sustainability. We consume more than we can produce. We waste more than Earth can recover from it. We consume more fish that can grow in nature and produce much more CO2 than trees can reproduce into oxygen. We live in debt. This resource debt is changing the planet and day by day decreasing its quality, flexibility, sustainability, or better say, the probability of sustaining life. What we are doing is only growing this debt against the planet. It’s not a fantasy story – this is the reality of our daily lives. We live in debt with resources. We live in the same arrogant, capitalist economics, showing the same parameters and freeloader behavior by consuming without paying attention to sustainability, quality, and geographic equality.
Only in the last years, we started to feel the impact of industrialization and overpopulation on natural resources. The world power generators and transportation infrastructure release into the atmosphere billions of tons of CO2, catastrophically impacting the environment and the climate. That highlighted at least about the topic talking over the 10.000 scientists during the past years. Storms, hurricanes, and water flooding will impact the population more and more. By predictions of 2050, water flooding will become a dangerous direct impact for over the 1 billion people living on the seaside. All this said, it looks like demographics growing cause a real danger for the planet, nature, and environment, but it’s not so exact as it may look at first sight.
Theories about the end of civilization due to the over-consuming of resources are not new. The resources question was raised first at the beginning of the 18th century by physics. In 1972, the Club of Rome created analytical documentation “The Limits to Growth” that compares the speed of growth with the impact to the existing and sustainable resources. According to calculations, continuous economic growth and demographic growth should create more and more pressure on the natural resources and biosphere of the planet. We live in debt with resources. At some point, a catastrophe must occur due to the depletion of natural resources and deadly pollution of the environment. Consequently, in a probable case scenario, we can expect the collapse of civilization in the middle of the 20th century. The full impact on the population will occur until the end of the 21st century. Every day, people require more food, water, energy, and many other goods to live their daily needs (or, better say, wishes). It is challenging to produce such a volume of resources without destroying the planet.
Based on the study, we started to live in Earth’s debt in 1987. That was the first year when the population consumed more resources than was possible to produce. From there, ecologists started to celebrate the day of Ecologic debt. There is one more aspect of the debt: the economics and sociology part of human civilization. The debt started sooner – in the second half of the 17th century with the first banking/centralized monetary system opening. The Post-War Generation was full of optimism and trust in the future, motivated for higher consumption with future technologies and advertisements. But we should not share this mood with them. We are in a very different situation.
