We’re behaving as if we had 1.5 earths available to us, and our behaviour is getting worse. Every year the Global Footprint Network calculates the date on which people use up one year’s worth of the planet’s biocapacity. In 2013 we achieved this on 20 August. This year we’ve done it a day earlier. In the 1960s there was no overshoot; we were only using around three-quarters of the earth’s capacity. Britain uses the biocapacity of a land area more than three times its size, making it worse than the United States, which behaves as if it were merely twice as big.

Original blog and comments: London Review of Books