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August 22 is Earth Overshoot Day
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You know what? I call bullcrap. we're not running out of things, we're a race who can't plan wisely for crap. Period.
If resources have pinged into overdraft territory, it's because we're lousy planners, lousy budgeters, and far too wasteful for what we do cultivate & harvest, not because nature's tapped out. If we switched at least partially to hemp for paper goods, we'd save a TON of trees in the process. If we built our living space in many more communal buildings (read: highrise apartments) in dense population areas, we'd have a ton more acreage in cities for local community gardens. Yes, 15 floors to climb in the event of no elevator seems a PITA, but it sure frees up a lot of ground space where untold numbers of apartments in various 2 or 3-floor buildings would have been. If rooftops were required to be designed for garden space, homeowners could grow that much more food themselves & combine it with their ground garden yields. Similar line of thought for businesses & public buildings for community gardens.
Another thing would be to teach the American populace to not effing waste their food anymore. If we're throwing out so much as 5% of what we buy, it's 5% too much waste. As it stands, I recall reading in the past few days that the US wastes an average of 40% of the food bought. Between restaurants & households, we're starving ourselves by way of stupidity & ineptitude, not lack of crops.
If we planned home building & business building better, we'd use a lot less timber for the bones of the structure. Hey, here's a thought! Recycle every last scrap of that junker car instead of towing it off to be crunched at the yard. Recycle every scrap of every building torn down, every house destroyed, every structure remodeled. We have a lot of building materials in these things that simply end up at the dumps. How many metal beams could be recouped from this for building? How much wood could be recouped & reused, turned into a recycled product, how much wiring that gets tossed would be reworked into something else? It's a very compelling thought.
The planet gives us exactly what we need & then some, very generously. We're the mentally challenged race on this rock who just can't make do with such a surplus because we're incapable of working together to manage it all, and then we wail when we've plowed through it. It's not Gaia's fault we're stupid.
If resources have pinged into overdraft territory, it's because we're lousy planners, lousy budgeters, and far too wasteful for what we do cultivate & harvest, not because nature's tapped out. If we switched at least partially to hemp for paper goods, we'd save a TON of trees in the process. If we built our living space in many more communal buildings (read: highrise apartments) in dense population areas, we'd have a ton more acreage in cities for local community gardens. Yes, 15 floors to climb in the event of no elevator seems a PITA, but it sure frees up a lot of ground space where untold numbers of apartments in various 2 or 3-floor buildings would have been. If rooftops were required to be designed for garden space, homeowners could grow that much more food themselves & combine it with their ground garden yields. Similar line of thought for businesses & public buildings for community gardens.
Another thing would be to teach the American populace to not effing waste their food anymore. If we're throwing out so much as 5% of what we buy, it's 5% too much waste. As it stands, I recall reading in the past few days that the US wastes an average of 40% of the food bought. Between restaurants & households, we're starving ourselves by way of stupidity & ineptitude, not lack of crops.
If we planned home building & business building better, we'd use a lot less timber for the bones of the structure. Hey, here's a thought! Recycle every last scrap of that junker car instead of towing it off to be crunched at the yard. Recycle every scrap of every building torn down, every house destroyed, every structure remodeled. We have a lot of building materials in these things that simply end up at the dumps. How many metal beams could be recouped from this for building? How much wood could be recouped & reused, turned into a recycled product, how much wiring that gets tossed would be reworked into something else? It's a very compelling thought.
The planet gives us exactly what we need & then some, very generously. We're the mentally challenged race on this rock who just can't make do with such a surplus because we're incapable of working together to manage it all, and then we wail when we've plowed through it. It's not Gaia's fault we're stupid.
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