The Biggest Risk to Humanity
Ecological overshoot is the second largest risk to humanity. Not reacting to it is the biggest. Mathis Wackernagel, co-creator of the ecological footprint and co-founder of the Global Footprint Network, joins us. Highlights of the conversations include:
How ecological footprint is calculated as a measure of how much of nature’s regenerative capacity humanity is using;
Why the estimate that we’re using the natural regenerative capacity of 1.7 Earths is an underestimate of humanity’s actual ecological overshoot;
Why shrinking our ecological footprint needs to be framed as an opportunity for resource security, not just noble and charitable but absolutely necessary if humanity hopes to end overshoot more by design and less by disaster;
Why international development schemes that emphasize GDP growth and not resource security won’t work for the ¾ of humanity stuck in the ‘ecological poverty trap’ of depleted resources and insufficient income to buy those resources from other countries;
Why countries not putting resource security at the center of their economic development plans is suicidal;
Why peoples’ motivation to end ecological overshoot will be driven by desire, agency, and curiosity - not by trying to command and control peoples’ behavior.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Nandita Bajaj (00:00:00):
Hello everyone. This is your co-host Nandita. In case you missed our announcement, The Overpopulation Podcast is now OVERSHOOT. As we have increasingly explored themes that go beyond the problem of overpopulation, ranging from pronatalism and economic growth obsession to technological fundamentalism and human supremacy, it's time that the podcast name reflect the full scope of our concerns. We will continue to bring you the same caliber of guests and range of topics, looking at both the drivers of overshoot and pathways out of this predicament. And with that, here's today's guest.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:00:39):
I consider overshoot in itself to be the second largest risk to humanity in the 21st century. And the biggest risk is not to react to it. We want to eat in the future. We want to be housed in the future, and we know there will be climate change and resource constraints, and this future is coming towards us faster than we can adjust to it. So if you want to be wise, we want to be sure that we can operate in that future. Why don't we focus on making sure the way we live is consistent with what's physically possible.
Alan Ware (00:01:09):
In this first episode of OVERSHOOT, we'll talk with Mathis Wackernagel, co-creator of the ecological footprint concept and co-founder of the Global Footprint Network. Mathis and his colleagues have been measuring the extent of our ecological overshoot for over 30 years. And this conversation offers an excellent overview of what overshoot is and what we might do to address it.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:41):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:02:08):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines we examine the forces underlying overshoot - from patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
If you have heard of 'footprint' as in carbon or ecological footprint, you already met Mathis Wackernagel. He created this metric with his PhD advisor, Bill Rees 30 years ago. Then he co-founded Global Footprint Network, a sustainability think tank known for its annual calculations, comparing each country's footprint to its biocapacity, showing that humanity is now using 1.7 Earths. Mathis and his organization engage with national governments, companies, and cities to address the implications of ecological overshoot for their ability to operate successfully in a future of climate change and resource constraints. Their best known campaign is the annual Earth Overshoot Day. His awards include the 2024 Sustainability Award of the Nobel Family, the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 International Association for Impact Assessment Global Environment Award, and the 2012 Blue Planet Prize and several honorary doctorates. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:54):
Hello and welcome to our podcast, Mathis. It is such a pleasure to have you.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:03:59):
It's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:01):
And Mathis, this is a particularly special episode because not only is it the first episode of the year, it is also the first episode under our new podcast name, OVERSHOOT. And with you being one of the key leaders in the world on the topic of overshoot, we are delighted to have you be an inaugural guest. And Mathis, congratulations on winning the Nobel Sustainability Award just a few months ago, which honored your contribution to measuring and responding to global ecological overshoot.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:04:35):
Thank you very much.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:37):
So we can dive right into our interview, Mathis. You and your PhD supervisor, Bill Rees, who is our advisor, developed the concept of the ecological footprint In the early 1990s. You then went on to co-found and lead the Global Footprint Network. We use global footprint network data as an elemental part of communicating about ecological overshoot, and ecological footprint has become a household term within sustainability circles over the last few decades. So let's begin with definitions. How do you define ecological footprint and biocapacity and how is it possible for humanity to be using the regenerative nature of 1.7 Earths?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:05:26):
Let me perhaps start with concept of overshoot. I consider overshoot in itself to be the second largest risk to humanity in the 21st century. And the biggest risk is not to react to it. The worst news is not to react to it, not the overshoot itself. Now overshoot is not a new concept. It comes out of ecology, but I think the recognition starts from that even people are animals. Animals live within a habitat. A habitat has a carrying capacity. Carrying capacity can be overused, but if it's overused, then the feedback from the habitat is kind of less food for the population and then the population will not be able to thrive as well, will decline. And so there's kind of this feedback loop between the ecosystems that support an animal population and the animal population. So the same thing applies to humanity as well.
(00:06:20):
Now how do we measure it? It's a bit different than with animals because we're more complex. We have technology, we can trade with distant places, but in the end it's quite similar. So the question for people rather than for animals has to be perhaps changed slightly. So we put it on its head essentially because to say how many people can live, let's say in Canada, becomes a hypothetical question because you can trade and it depends on how much you consume, et cetera. But you can turn the question upside down and it becomes a researchable, empirical question, which is how many Canadas is Canada now consuming, for example. So it becomes very much like an agricultural question, you know. So saying how big is the farm called Canada? How hungry are people in Canada? So not just hungry for food, but obviously we consume much more than food. We build our houses. We use energy to move around, produce products, et cetera.
(00:07:15):
So that's then kind of the sense of how we can look at that balance. A second insight is that I would say the mother of all resources, the overarching resource really is the regenerative power of nature. So we could call it like the photosynthetic activity of ecosystems - so the ability of ecosystems to translate solar energy into biomass that then becomes the food source for all animal life. So why is that the mother of all resources? It's the mother of all resources because obviously it limits how much we can produce food and fiber and timber, et cetera. But also it is becoming the limiting factor for fossil fuel use because fossil fuels are very plentiful. They're limited too, but they're more limited by how much the biosphere can absorb in terms of CO2, or if it doesn't absorb it, the impacts on climate change will be so dramatic that it reduces then the carrying capacity as well.
(00:08:10):
The same is true for mining. There are lots of minerals underground, but the question is how many of them we can get out without destroying too much of the biosphere? Because it takes space to make mines. I mean it's not just the hole, but then also the pollution that it creates, et cetera, the energy it takes, which is typically now fossil energy to dig the holes and to concentrate the ores, et cetera. So even mining is more constrained by regeneration than by the ores underground overall. So that makes it all a competition for regeneration. That's why looking through the lens of regeneration is a helpful first approximation to understand the size of our venture, our economies or our way of living on this planet as humans compared to the size of the planet. So that's kind of the premise that we started from back in the early nineties, and it's still true.
(00:09:06):
And so the way to calculate is actually quite straightforward. It's like a farmer wants to know, like, how much can you produce on your farm. So, essentially we translate everything into how much regeneration is embodied in that process. Right? You take a glass of orange juice. Somewhere there's a tree that grows oranges that you need to harvest. It takes energy to, kind of, harvest and to process the oranges to make them into juice, and then to bring the juice to your table. All that represents regeneration. That space that then is embodied in your orange juice. And so you can add that up for all the things you do. Obviously there's a devil in the detail. There's also the complication that not every surface area is of the same productivity. So that's why we use a common unit. We call it the global hectare. Global hectare in a given year represents an average hectare with average productivity of the planet of those hectares that are productive. Only about a quarter of the surface of the planet is sufficiently productive to be, like, used through harvest, et cetera.
(00:10:09):
So by using a standard hectare, then we can compare hectares around the world. Some of them are much more productive, they have, like, good climate and enough water, good soils, et cetera, flat. Others are much less productive. So there's a huge variance in what a global hectare can produce, but then you can basically compare anything at any scale in terms of, like,how do they compare to each other. Like, how much capacity is there in Costa Rica compared to Switzerland? How much do they consume in different places, I as a person, as a city, as a country, et cetera. So that's essentially how it works. There's a bias in the approach that makes the accounts conservative, meaning they underestimate overshoot because on the footprint side, some things are not counted just because data's not available, it's not totally complete. There's some significant aspects that are still excluded, for example, methane emissions, there's so many different sources of methanes, it's hard to have a full account. So that's a systematic underestimate for example. And then on the supply side, biocapacity is also based on UN data sets. UN data sets typically are very production oriented and that means they undercount the damage. Things like soil depletion or groundwater depletion, its not included in the current accounts. So not to the extent that we could actually say, wow, how much of the biocapacity is actually fragile? It's not something we can count on in the long run. So that makes our accounts rather conservative.
Nandita Bajaj (00:11:36):
Yeah, that's very helpful. So you're also just saying essentially that the 75% additional demands that we're placing on Earth is an underestimation.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:11:46):
We believe so, yeah.
Nandita Bajaj (00:11:48):
And that makes sense. We just wrote a recent paper called Confronting the UN's Pro-Growth Agenda, and in it we recognize, you know, how much co-optation there has been of UN agencies, by political and ideological and special interest forces that are underreporting the impact that some of these industries are having and they are pushing for more economic growth. But then the other thing that I found interesting in this underrepresentation was how much focus there is on human beings, like how much anthropocentrism there is when UN is producing these data sets. We're not looking at the biocapacity for other species that we are taking from. It's very, very human centered. So that was also very telling.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:12:40):
It's also a funny paradox that if you look at the footprint, it's actually an incredibly, like, fragmentary, utilitarian way of looking at the world. You just say, okay, there's so much planet, how much is being squeezed out of the planet? How much is there? How much can we use, et cetera. And interesting enough, we get more love from the environmental community and less from the economic community, but actually it's like you could say it's a totally economic tool. It's about the allocation of existing resources and, even according to those principles, we're not doing particularly well. We're essentially living off depletion.
Nandita Bajaj (00:13:15):
And despite the kind of utilitarian perspective, it is an instructive tool in that it allows us to see just how far beyond Earth's biocapacity we are living, but also we appreciate how in addition to calculating the global footprint, you also highlight the enormous differences in average per capita consumption within different countries like you've done for individual footprints. If everyone lived an average person in the US, you would need five Earths versus in India you would need 0.8 Earths. Like you're saying, it's not in its totality including everything, all the interconnected relationships that we have with the ecosystem. It does capture some of the inequalities.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:14:04):
Yeah, I mean it just describes what is. It's bookkeeping, bean counting where we really count the beans, and then you can describe what's going on. It's not about what's the ideal world going to look like? It's about just basic conditions of quantity flows, how much quantity do we use, how much quantity is there available? And then we can make choices. What surprised me in my professional life because when we started we thought, oh, we are offering a service to humanity, this is helpful information, people will love it. And that's what I've learned and that's what I'm still learning more on like how can it be presented as a true opportunity? Because if people don't see it as an opportunity, they will use their beautiful brain to fight it rather than to embrace it. So how can we get better at explaining the opportunity? And I'm sure we can talk more about that.
Alan Ware (00:14:53):
And for people who wonder how we're using 1.7 Earths, it's important to note that 60% of the footprint or 60% of our overshoot is the carbon element, right? The forested lands we would have to create to absorb the CO2.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:15:10):
Yeah, it’s actually 60% of the total footprint globally is associated with what some people would call the carbon footprint, which has an interesting story as well, because when Bill and I, when we started, obviously climate change was already being discussed quite strongly in the early nineties. And so we saw the carbon demand as a competing use, so that's one that is there, but still many people saw, oh yeah, carbon, you can't really see that. It's kind of silly to have that in there. And the pendulum switched totally by the early 2000s where suddenly I think the interest in climate change got much stronger and is now still the primary kind of conversation in the arena I would say. And then everything was just carbon footprint suddenly and not anymore the larger issues, which is I couldn't have predicted, because I thought carbon is so abstract and we don't see it, how can any kind of an emotional reaction to carbon, but somehow that happened for the better or the worse. The notion of carbon footprint, if you think about it, it's actually quite silly. Carbon is a weight and it's not a surface area and why is it a footprint, that's so strange, but actually it was much more broadly embraced even to the extent that some oil companies started to promote the idea of carbon footprint. And now like carbon footprint you see that on every airline magazine various times mentioned stop collecting water bottles that have a carbon footprint on it. It has become a little silly.
Alan Ware (00:16:37):
Right.And in 2017 your team launched the ecological footprint explorer, which is an open data platform for the national footprint and biocapacity accounts and impressively that provides ecological footprint results for over 200 countries and territories. So how are those calculated?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:16:55):
So every year we recalculate all the data for all the countries back to 1961. When I say we it is now quite a complication of organizations. It's actually York University that is producing, regenerating these accounts every year, and so they need to be recalculated because improvements are being made. The UN, for example, updates its data sources, so sometimes even the same dataset has slightly shifted data and then better data is becoming available. Then we have another group called FoDaFo, a footprint data organization, which is the governance body where we collectively think, like, how does it need to be improved and then also approve like the latest edition to make sure the consistency from edition to edition and within the edition. And so the robustness of what we offer can be improved. The first time humanity used more than what Earth can renew in total, we think it's in the early seventies, and that's interesting time period because around the seventies the interest in resource issues was pretty strong.
(00:18:02):
We had reports like Limits to Growth. There was the oil crisis and also back then already climate change was being recognized as an issue. I just saw an interesting memo to Jimmy Carter that was written around that time saying, oh, we need to look into this. This could be quite significant. Let's not panic, but there may be a need to kind of shift our energy system over time. It's just surprising how little we have done about it because the dependence on fossil fuels has not been shifted really in percentage, in total amount. Obviously we use much, much more, but the percentage of the overall commercial energy use is still about the same as back then.
Nandita Bajaj (00:18:44):
And even as we talk more and more about things like the green energy transition, unless we talk about reducing the demands both on the consumption and the population side, it's just an additive process. It's just adding to the use of fossil fuel energy, all the extra mining, processing that's needed to build renewable energy. So we do appreciate that you are tackling both sides of the coin of reducing demand, reducing consumption, which a lot of environmental circles it's not talked about.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:19:19):
Actually I believe or what I recognize is that the selling reduced demand is not very popular, so how can we sell it as a benefit? I had this quite amazing experience because in the early days of the footprint, I was excited by this new idea. I got invited to go and give lectures around the world and a big company Ontario Hydro, they printed a lot of buttons, said 'reduce your footprint' and we had hats, 'reduce your footprint', and bags, 'reduce your footprint'. And I probably handed out over like 10 thousand of these buttons personally until I went to a lecture in Chile and a student at the end of the lecture told me, Why should I reduce my footprint so that you can eat more chocolate? That was quite an insight. That was one of the most insightful comments I got. So just an honest reflection of, What's in it for me?
(00:20:11):
And so to realize like this needs to be told a quite different way to say what's the benefit to you? So now I think the benefit, it may sound very boring, but I would summarize it as saying I'm selling resource security. So resource security allows you to be safe. So it's not about I'm not taking your chocolate away. I help you to be safe. It means not being as dependent on large resource flows is of benefit to you. If you say give up your chocolate for humanity, it's just for many people not as exciting. Or actually some people may get scared, say, oh my god, it's a difficult future. Why in this situation should I give up my advantages? That's how they hold it. But that's kind of the knee-jerk reaction and then that's what's dominating the conversation and the narrative and that's why it's so stuck. The way we frame climate change and even call it negotiation, nationally determined contributions.
(00:21:06):
So this is, Ah you generous country, how much are you willing to give up for humanity? It's the same non-winning rhetoric. And so we have endless conversations. So what's useful about the UN is to get together and say, is there an issue there we need to address and what might be a useful goal? So to kind of set a common standard and say, oh wow, 1.5 degrees may not be very good, like two degrees even worse increase of Celsius compared to a pre-industrial level. So that's very useful I think to kind of have a common understanding of what may be a threshold that you don't want to breach in some ways. But then to believe that it's kind of like a budget game where I won't move if you don't move type conversation is actually silly because the world is actually operating exactly the opposite way and that we don't see. The less other people prepare themselves for the inevitable future of climate change and resource constraints, the more you are at risk. That may sound like bad news. It's actually good news. It shows that you're independent of the others. The less others do, the more preparing yourself is of benefit to yourself. So waiting for others is the most idiotic thing you can do and most hold it the exact other way. Oh, so sad, we negotiate so hard, we couldn't agree, let's wait for another year. I mean it's not helpful to you and it's not how the dynamics actually play out.
Nandita Bajaj (00:22:24):
Yeah, and one of the things you're pointing to there is in terms of the preparedness for all of the different symptoms of overshoot, you've talked about how overshoot will end, whether it's by design or disaster. And you're starting to get into a little bit of the design aspect. What are some aspects for our countries and individuals to be better prepared by design and to avert to whatever degrees possible, a disastrous expression? How do we get to the better disaster versus the worst one?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:22:59):
That's actually Peter Victor who came up with this phrase 'by design or disaster'. So I mean obviously overshoot will end. You cannot forever use more than what you get. So that's not possible. So it will end, and then perhaps it's too simple to say it's by design or by disaster, you choose or kind of nature chooses. It's probably a combination of both. So it's kind of where are we on the spectrum overall? But yes, there's a lot of choice that we have around it. It's not a question whether we want to accept overshoot or not. The question is how we'll respond to it overall. And I think to also recognize that responding to it is actually helpful. Again, there’s like some negative connotation, people make fun of preppers, preppers' bunker mentality, but actually preparing yourself for what you can anticipate, there's never a downside. And prepping yourself is not bunker mentality because actually the most effective ways to prepare yourself in any situation, whatever it may be, but particularly also in the context of overshoot, is to do things that are replicable. And in the context of overshoot, if you say, oh, my prepping is to move to New Zealand - that's not replicable for 8 billion people. But things you do to prepare yourself that is replicable, that doesn't take away from others, but actually helps others. Like for example, making your house more weatherproof and then far more energy efficient, that's good for you and it's good for everybody else and everybody else could also imitate that. So these are aspects that are replicable that are actually much more winnable for you and at the same time also have the societal benefit. So there's a lot of choice.
Alan Ware (00:24:35):
I like that, yeah. It's like a design for resource security. As you mentioned, we have a system that's based on efficiency and last minute inventory, global supply chains, and we've seen how easily disrupted they are. So you think for resource security we need redundancy, which is kind of expensive in an efficient goal kind of system. But to be flexible, adaptive, I think you've mentioned that would be part of the design for the sake of security, which I think has been, during the neoliberal era it was much more focused on choice, and winning the golden ticket, and being the small business person type who can reach for the stars. And I think we're seeing around the world more and more concern with security politically both on the right and the left.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:25:24):
One big downside of resource security is it's so incredibly boring. It's not fun to talk, as to say who are the evil people? So that's kind of gets people very excited. The blame shame game is more media friendly overall. And so I think that's why this hasn't been winning so much. A medical doctor once he told me that's interesting when he thought a lot about I think environment too, but he put it to the point I think quite interestingly, he said people are more afraid of empty fridges than overflowing garbage cans. And I mean it sounds pretty basic, but in some ways the garbage you can kick down the road to the neighbor, it's kind of, ah, the garbage's already out. It's kind of bad and it's ugly, whatever, but it's away already. And more away is even better and it becomes this collective problem. But your fridge being empty, oh my god.
(00:26:20):
And unfortunately the stories we tell too much from the perspective of the garbage can and don't realize that actually that links back to the fridge again. That even climate change in the end is not a garbage can story. It's an empty fridge story, but we're not very good at making that connection in some ways to see why does it actually matter to you. And I think that's what's missing. And I think that's also the opportunity from the overshoot perspective that if you can't solve a problem, make it bigger. And this may be one of the examples where actually if we make climate change bigger and look at the overshoot of the bigger context, it becomes easier for so many reasons. One is because it starts to actually bring all these competing problems under one hat because as we already said, we are so dependent on fossil fuels.
(00:27:12):
Where do you get stuff from otherwise? For example, in the early sixties, I think about 97% of all the fibers we used in the world were biological like cotton, wool. Now I think it's less than 30% overall. When I just looked at myself, what I'm wearing, actually I'm wearing plastic here, some metal and my glasses are plastic. So we're so dependent on the fossil fuels that what will substitute it? So by looking at everything together, then we bring together biodiversity loss with climate change, with food security, with energy security. So it becomes all one and we start to see how do we manage the overall budget. It also I think starts to be able to explain more easily. I mean I still don't know what the kilogram of CO2 looks like somehow we know it's hard to manage it a lot or how much do I emit?
So it's quite abstract, but if you express it in terrain, people can imagine how big is my house? How big is my country? How big is my region, my city, like how much do they use? It becomes understandable even though that's why we also translated the idea of overshoot into time, which is this kind of a direct translation, like a budget translation by when has humanity used up its budget? Do it in time and say, oh my god, by like August we've already used up everything. That's early, but why is there beer in the fridge afterwards? Oh there is because we can deplete, we can live off the stocks. Anyhow, so that's the second benefit that we can make it more I think visually understandable and say, wow, how many Switzerlands does it take to support Switzerland? Actually four. Where are they? Is that a risk?
Oh we have money in Switzerland. How much? Do the others have more and more money, like will we be able outcompete them forever? Anyhow, that's kind of the metric thing that becomes more visceral. And then the third advantage is probably the biggest one, which we have also touched already that I think when we just look at climate for example, and if you look at climate, you just look at CO2 emissions, the dynamics that you face is what economists would call free rider problem, which means you get a free ride, society pays for it. And then you can have also an inverse free rider where you actually pay for something but society doesn't pay you back in some ways. So that's how climate change is seen like, oh, I give up my ability to have a long warm shower, which requires CO2 emissions for the benefit of humanity, but what does humanity give me back?
And then you get angry at the neighbor who still takes long showers. So it's a cynicism machine too. So it's kind of these free rider problems are extremely difficult to resolve. So we shy away from them. If we look at it from a resource security perspective or overshoot perspective and say, wow, we live in a world of constrained budgets, being able to operate well without using many resources becomes an advantage for me, for my city, for my company, for my country. And so it actually starts to align the incentives. And I believe that one of the tragedies today is that we don't see that the individual incentives, and particularly whether it's an individual, whether it's a company, whether it's a city, whether it's a country, are far, far more aligned with ending overshoot by design than we believe. And so we live in this kind of story where we're so convinced it's not in our benefit.
There's now an interesting case study happening. As I said, I come from Switzerland. In Switzerland we have initiatives where people can vote for something, not just for people, not just elections, but on issues. So it's about four times a year, probably typically three issues. And on the next ballot there's only one issue and it's about whether Switzerland should live within the means of the planet. And it's quite tragic because both sides argue in such a flawed way from my perspective. The proponents say there's planetary boundaries, and that's true. They say Switzerland is so rich, we have the obligation to act for the world and it would produce jobs, et cetera. And then the contrarians from the government says, oh, it would require less consumption. That's not acceptable and it would be hard for the economy and we do so much already and Switzerland is so small compared to the rest of the world, why should we do that?
You know, so it's a real tragedy. I think it's going to be a setback for the overall conversation because they're not able to tell the story from this perspective of necessity, but just from this noble cause, like this charitable idea. So charity idea, I think it's kind of Old Testament thinking, you know, We're the rich, we give to the poor and so the poor always stay poor, but we're the rich so we feel good. And it's kind of the New Testament thinking, I think that's one of the core, I'm not a scholar, but that's one of the core tenets of the New Testament, is to say we're actually all in the same boat, you know. We're equals. Jesus had dinner with everybody, not just the kings, for example. And that's also came out in the French revolution as an idea, the idea of solidarity as they call it, fraternité, so that we are in it together.
Once you'll help me, then I'll help you. We are in it together. So I think it's kind of moving out of this charitable mindset in the Swiss case that they say, oh, we are just good for the world. If they said it the other way around, I think it would make probably more sense to say, look, the future never has been more predictable than it is now. We want to eat in the future, we want to be housed in the future and we know there will be climate change and resource constraints and this future is coming towards us faster than we can adjust to it probably. And it's come so fast because the impacts are cumulative. It's not how much overshoot we had last year. It's the accumulation of overshoot over time. So if you want to be wise, we want to have a valuable economy, we want to be sure that we can operate in that future.
Why don't we focus on making sure the way we live is consistent with what's physically possible? Because when we are there, we will be able to have much better lives. Are we willing to invest in being safe? But that's kind of missing. And so it just feeds into this noble narrative that basically just builds walls between the various perspective, am I willing to give up more for humanity? So that's kind of the tragedy in that way and I think that's why the overshoot perspective could be so helpful and very practically at every level help people think about it in actually a much more simple way rather than using the term sustainable. They could just say what's going to be valuable in that predictable future? And so what is value? People saying, oh, is that capitalism? Actually, value or assets really are its capacity, it's the capacity to be able to produce food, to house people, to move around, et cetera. Do we have physically those capacities that enable us to live well? And that's both on the demand and the supply side.
Alan Ware (00:34:01):
Yeah, and the website, Earth Overshoot Day, where you talk about the several factors that determine the extent of our ecological overshoot, and then you suggest pathways of how we might decrease the severity. So we could get into those factors that could help decrease overshoot. Do you want to go through some of those?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:34:18):
Absolutely saying, okay, what's going to be valuable in the future from a company or a city perspective or even country perspective? Like from a company I would say it's those which, when there is more of them, global overshoot goes down because their services will be needed more. They will not run into constraints. They will not be faced with the resource costs that make things more difficult. There are these opportunities where if you actually have more of something, overshoot goes down. We call that power of possibility. And so we started to make a website and wanted to overwhelm people with all the possibilities of where there are human activities and economic activities that actually would lead to less overshoot. I just could give one example. We worked with a German recycling company. So as a reference point, typically in the world right now to produce $1 value add per year, it takes a farm of two square meters, like the size of a single bed probably, roughly.
That's the size of Earth necessary to produce on average a dollar value add. And it varies across countries, but that company for example, per dollar value add that they create through the services, reduce global overshoot about 30 square meters. So 15 times more than the word goes up per dollar, they go down, as an example. But then we can go perhaps more generic just to think what's the categories we could think about. In which categories are there possibilities for resource reductions? And so just to make it simple, think of your hand, what can be done. So we have the thumb represents regeneration. So there's many ways how we can boost regeneration by restoring ecosystems and regenerative farming and also be careful with nature, et cetera, make the land more valuable. So that's on the supply side.
On the demand side, we identify four. So one is just, we call it cities or how we live. The way we organize things affects very much how we live. Probably the way the city is structured has a bigger influence on how we live than our mothers in some ways because that's how things are laid out, where we shop, what we do, et cetera. So urban design has a huge impact. If you compare traditional cities that weren't built on cars like Mediterranean cities, they're very walkable, some people call them the 15 minute cities, et cetera. We compare them to very sprawled cities as we can see, like Canberra for example in Australia or many American cities, very car dependent. Probably the quality of life may be better in the Mediterranean city and the resource consumption, much, much higher per person in the sprawling cities. So that's the city.
The second finger is how do we power our cities? Do we power it with coal power? Do we power it with renewables? So that makes a big difference as well. Third one is how do we feed ourselves? Currently human demand for food corresponds to about half the biocapacity of the entire planet. So it's a pretty significant amount. And then obviously the fourth one, which is quite significant is how many are we? If we have twice as many people, there's only half as much planet per person. That's math. So now this is a dynamic that shifts much more slowly. So if you think for example that the need to move out of carbon, if you want to avoid runaway climate change or high level of climate change, we would need to move out of carbon much faster than a population size can reasonably adjust without too much pain.
But then population is also cumulative, so things happen over time quite significantly. If you consistently add or subtract from a big number, we have a little scenario tool that says if these things happen, what will be it mathematically? How does it multiply out? So we look at the past and then we say, okay, how do you choose that the population reproductive rates are and how do you choose, how quickly will they change and what will be the consumption levels, et cetera. Then you can see how the curve shifts over time, so could be quite significant. And we have also such huge spreads in terms of reproductive levels. If you think of places like the south of India, Kerala for example, or Portugal, very low reproductive rates. And then you still have places where actually the population growth is still up. The world is still growing in net terms and at a time where we're in overshoot.
That's also why we wrote a paper that I think summarizes the challenge best called "The Importance of Resource Security for Poverty Eradication". The conventional development paradigm is to say, with more money you can solve more problems. Giving people the opportunity to have more money is a great thing because with a bit more money they can actually choose which problems to attack and they'll be better off. So there's no downside to helping people have more money, so more income. And sounds like a very sound great argument. The challenge is though that in order to have economic machines operate, we need the resources to feed them. So if these economies now live off depletion, that means not poverty eradication, maybe poverty reduction temporarily. When you look at just from a country by country basis, many people now live in countries with two simultaneous challenges that would, from our perspective, define resource security. One is you don't have the resources in your country, meaning you use more than what you have available. Then you're in a deficit situation. Plus they have the other challenge too. They earn less nominally than world average, because in international trade, if you have less income than others, the likelihood of you being able to buy more from the others than they are able to buy from you is very, very low.
That's what money does. Money is kind of the vacuum cleaner. Where do resources flow to? So it's not that wild concept. It's just to say, okay, how many people live in a country in an ecological deficit, meaning they use more than what they have, and they earn less than world average income. Turns out a few years ago, 72% of the world population is in that camp. It's a significant amount of people that are exposed to very high resource risks. So not addressing that is really anti-poor overall. And that's kind of the tragedy in our kind conventional sustainability conversations. Even the sustainable development goals underestimate, under-achieve on the overshoot front, putting us in peril. It's actually the foundational base. If you don't have the resources to run things, you're not able to run things. That's just physics. I would say there are two key ingredients for any society to operate. One of them is resources, having resource access. The other one is obviously trust. Because if you don't have trust in each other, then you cannot work with each other. And I see in a lot of places around the world we are eroding both, but we don't have to. But I think if you focus on these things, the underpinning things that are actually making us fragile, we could move the balance much more towards design rather than disaster.
Nandita Bajaj (00:41:09):
And I think that's where the calculations that you've done are also helpful in understanding the role of population growth. Those are also the countries where fertility rates are high, gender equality is low, population growth is still happening. And looking at both the biocapacity deficit and the low income, you recognize too that a lot of the people living in these countries, which are the majority of the people, are not choosing to live that way. That even tiny increases in their consumption level, which would be a desirable thing from a social justice perspective, you do want people to raise their standard of living, would push the overshoot even further beyond the 75% we're in.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:42:02):
Absolutely not addressing the population dynamic, from my perspective, I would call it cynical, because right now we have 1.5 global hectares per person on the planet. Maybe you want to leave a good chunk of it also for biodiversity. I think a robust way would be you halve, 0.75. So for anybody with a footprint over 0.75 global hectares to question that we shouldn't even kind of consider that population dynamics as something to be addressed is cynical. And I think also one aspect of the population discussion that makes it more difficult is that it's painted as a global problem, rather than I think it's actually also local tragedies as particularly countries that already have resource scarce and have growing population. They put themselves into the very tight corner, not about finger pointing, oh, you had that before, therefore we have the right. It's also kind of with climate, the finger pointing of saying you could, therefore we can.
There's very strange arguments. The question is like what's in the interest of a country? And that's kind of the stunning thing about if you look at the economic development plans of countries, I haven't found many yet that have resource security at the center of their economic development plans. I would bluntly call them suicidal. I mean it's like if you don't see that necessity, that's really a disservice to your country, the people that you are representing. It's stunning and it doesn't seem to shock people. Locally having a larger population makes it more difficult for you to be resource secure. And there's so many benefits. I mean even if there were no ecological benefits to it, there's like the bigger question of saying, Why would we exclude a big part of the population from helping in decision making, being part of economic activities, the intellectual pursuits, spiritual pursuits? Where's the benefit there like from a societal perspective in addition to the cruelty it involves, I think. So from that perspective, and as we see as all members of society can participate more fully, it leads to smaller populations. How can we approach this from a perspective saying we love people, but this is out of the love for people and people receive that as for the love for people, not as, wow, the world would be better without you - not so inviting to most people.
It is unfortunate also the other voices that have become so adamantly anti-human. That kind of has more play thenin the media then that produces a lot of damage. So the discussion can be polluted very easily.
Nandita Bajaj (00:44:40):
Very true.
Alan Ware (00:44:41):
And that love implies respect for the equal dignity of all individuals, which then builds that trust that you were saying resource security and trust. So yeah, you do need that love, respect of other people to build trust or you do quickly erode that and it becomes quite hard to get anything done cooperatively at a community, nation-state, world level.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:45:08):
And I think that's where there's also the overlap between resource security and trust. This seems to be a paradox, but as countries and communities and cities are more resource secure, they have a sense of autonomy, and a sense of autonomy allows for cooperation, then for trust, rather than being afraid of each other, backstabbing and everything depends on everybody else and then people get very nervous about each other.
Nandita Bajaj (00:45:30):
Yeah, we couldn't agree more. And on that topic, your team has at Global Footprint Network has also developed a tool for individuals called the Ecological Footprint Calculator to understand how these factors play out in their personal lives. And we're very familiar with the tool. I use it a lot with my students just to even introduce them to different factors that are at play in personal footprint calculations. But if you can give us a very quick behind the scenes look at the tool?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:46:05):
When we started footprint thinking, the focus was largely on countries, cities, et cetera, but there's been a demand, like what does it mean for individuals? So we actually produced I think the first footprint calculator for individuals we produced in Excel in the mid-nineties, and then became web-based, very popular. And on some level I wish I could turn it off, but I don't. Why don't I do it? Because it's so popular, and I think we do it better than many others, particularly pedagogically, how to make it empowering because most easily people are left with the idea, like we talked about, the eating less chocolate part. So oh, you're telling me to eat less chocolate? What's in it for me? Most people who take the calculator probably are forced to take it, invited kindly by their teachers and they already know the message beforehand - big footprint, bad. So it leads to kind of not putting in the right data, whatever. They try to make the footprint as small as possible and still doesn't fit within the planet, and that's so frustrating and that's so mean. And then get lots of emails about that too and say, yeah, so that's what it is. But so we, we've tried to make it more engaging. The question at the end we ask is, What approaches do you love? What solutions, what possibilities do you love? So it's hopefully getting people more excited about where do you want to be engaged?
Nandita Bajaj (00:47:25):
I'll share my experience and I use it with my graduate students. So they are already at a level where they can take a lot of personal responsibility. I've tried using it with high school students and they don't have a lot of control over things - where they live, and do they use a car or not. But adults I find, especially those who are environmentally conscious, often do want to know what are things that they can do to minimize their impact and the fact that you have car usage versus public transportation, how much flying do you do, do you eat plant-based versus animal-based foods, local versus imported? It gamifies in a way the factors behind overshoot, you know, how globalized the world is and how little we have control over, but the things that we do have control over, we can manage like diet and transportation, et cetera. In that way I will share that the experience of the students is quite positive, at least the adult ones that are taking it.
But I did wonder, I'm sure you're familiar with a very famous Lund study that came out in 2017 that you were talking earlier about how do you visualize carbon? And I thought they did a very nice job in creating this graphic of how much CO2 equivalent do your activities produce? And they had some of the top impact, high impact actions like going plant-based, flying less, or you know, not owning a car. And one of the highest impact activities is having one fewer child, which was 20 to 70 times more effective than not owning a car, not flying, or being vegan. And it gained a lot of popularity. It also got a lot of dissent from people for a number of reasons. But I appreciate that you have a short video right at the end of the quiz saying, what about population? And that at least it's part of the conversation there. Is there a reason why it was left out of the calculation or are you thinking in a future version you might include it?
Mathis Wackernagel (00:49:31):
Yeah, so just from a structural physical perspective, it's like not a totally parallel argument. So one is kind of the long-term implications of a choice, the environmental impact of a child, also to say like what's the reproductive choice of your child? So it's an infinite amount of resource demand that you open up potentially from a population perspective. That's why we then also produce the scenario calculator where you can combine the effects, and say like how many people use how much resource and the dynamics and how it plays out over time, because the population dynamics happens very slowly while the consumption changes could actually happen much more quickly. The overarching scenario calculator is a more helpful way to understand the different dynamics and how they play out. And that's where you then also have these various parameters that actually play a role. Like for example, the age of the mother also actually has an impact on the population side that people don't think about it.
If generations live more overlapping, then they're more people alive at the same time. If they're more stretched out, then the population gets smaller, just to think more bit fully about what actually affects population. And most people would not want to reduce, for example, longevity, which also has an impact on population size. So we want to make it a bit more curiosity driven. I personally believe what's missing most is intrinsic motivation because the psychological pressure to act is mostly driven by conformity, meaning we imitate what the others do. Unfortunately, what the others do isn't helpful for the sustainability transformation largely. So conformity is not that helpful. So that's why intrinsic motivation is much more important. And all the main psychologists come to the conclusion, like in sports and medicine and education and everywhere, it's about self-determination - people feel they actually choose themselves. If they don't have a sense that they actually have agency in the game, most likely they're resistant overall.
And in many change movements, because we are so adamant about the change we want to see, that we become little command control centers and reduce people's sense of agency and self-determination. So that's why I think finding this balance, how do we generate conditions that people increase their own motivation? It's really at the core, and we see three key pieces that are necessary for that. One is the sense of desire. Can you help tell it in a way that people want it? The second one is, as we just talked about, the sense of agency that actually think they can do something. They don't have to have full control, but just by being able to participate in some ways physically, they actually probably feel more motivated by it as well, don't feel as helpless. And then the third one is curiosity, which may need to be the most important one because we don't really know how to make it happen. And for many, that's overwhelming. If we can position that as something of an exciting opportunity that people are needed and it's actually learning more things and it's exciting to be surprised and learn new things, then people stay in the game as well. So I think if we are able through our engagements to increase desires, increase a sense of agency, increase a sense of curiosity, then we may offer a positive contribution.
Nandita Bajaj (00:52:40):
Yeah, I really like those, because it's also pointing to the fluidity of cultures that these shifts can be made and that we are very malleable in terms of our thinking. In fact, just last year a number of us co-authored a paper, Bill Rees and I included, "The World Scientists Warning: The Behavioral Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot", where we recognize that overshoot, of course, is the fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms that we've talked about today. But then further, we were proposing that overshoot itself is a symptom of deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behavior where so much of the self-interest and selfishness and a lot of the competitive behaviors have been prioritized and privileged within the current modern techno-industrial capitalist environment. And how marketing has played such a huge role in shifting cultures toward those maladaptive behaviors and how we can use the power of the same type of mechanism to help norm shift behaviors toward things that you're pointing to that are actually good for us, but also good for the environment. And that's the main argument of the paper is that we are fluid, our behaviors are fluid, and we need to reclaim some of the more cooperative behaviors that we have had for millennia.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:54:10):
I think we opened the conversation by saying the biggest risk is not overshoot itself, but not reacting to overshoot. Why is there such a massive overshoot? And as we said earlier, Alan pointed out the high percentage of the overall footprint that now comes from fossil fuels. We're so hooked on just cheap energy driving economic possibilities just incredibly. For me, one of the most shocking statistics is within the life of my son who was born just in the year 2000 humanity from all the fossil fuels ever used, we've used 46% in his lifetime. So how massively we have maintained our dependence on a fuel we know doesn't have a future. So seeing that as a risk. So I think it's collectively not seeing that risk, which is even from a most cutthroat economics perspective, I find it very hard how economic thinking cannot see that as a fundamental risk.
The thought about we can always get more resources from somewhere else, which obviously also feeds then colonialism, just is still present even in the way we urbanize. We continue to build cities in a time when we are in massive overshoot. A city is not possible without massive inflow of resources from elsewhere. So we are building traps for ourselves. We're building assets that will not be able to be maintained. So we don't even have to call it colonialism. It's kind of this colonial spirit that in the end hurts us. So I think it's even the collective DNA questions in some ways that misguide us against our self-interest. And that's for me stunning. So sometimes I feel that's perhaps a cruel way of kind of summarizing it. I feel like I'm going around the world or having conversations suggesting to people, Hey, it's a bad idea to cut off your arm. It's really, without the arm it's not that easy to live. Why do you cut off your arm? It's not good for you. Oh, what a great idea. I never heard of that. Oh my, interesting. Then a year later you talk again. They still keep cutting off their arms and they, oh yeah, it's what we learned in school. They taught us at Harvard. It's not even enlightened self-interest. It's like crude, cutthroat basic self-interest that we don't see.
Nandita Bajaj (00:56:12):
And I really wonder, and I Bill Rees talked about this during our podcast is especially I think when we became so disconnected from the land and from where our food was coming and it all became externalized through the globalization and the trade practices, et cetera, we no longer have connection. We don't see our food supply. We don't see our efforts. We basically are so disconnected. Maybe it's just that our brains are just maladapted to consider that large of a problem, that is to look at the other side of the world and have moral concern.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:56:53):
I mean it's our strength and our downfall in some ways. The humans have been able to actually get bonded over collective stories so that doesn't then limit the numbers. And so the scale can become much, much larger. I mean that also happened in the Roman Empire when people, that's a million people living in a city that depended on food from around the Mediterranean and then when that empire wasn't there anymore, then they couldn't get that supply any longer. So it's kind of a strength that we have the ability to collaborate so broadly in much larger groups. And also the strength is also becoming also a challenge, obviously. My hope is that actually if we see things straight, we have incredible innovation capacity and abilities to operate, like the beliefs that we hold and to what extent they can be shifted because they're not biologically programmed necessarily. But they are collective choices that we can become aware of and see as helpful or not helpful. That's where I see the potential for transformation.
Alan Ware (00:57:50):
Yeah, that's all pushing against the broader system that still has a kind of profit maximization, short-term interest, create externalities somewhere, either pushing it off onto the future or other places in the present.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:58:05):
Yes. It'll flip once some people start to realize that physical and societal wealth that exists is more significant than the symbols of tokens in which we have more trust than in physical reality. Like if countries, for example, with biocapacity reserves recognize, wow, we are the wealthy ones. The others just have funny money. So just to switch what will be valuable again in the future and then say, wow, maybe it's not money, maybe it's not bitcoins, maybe it's ecological resources. I'm mentioning that more in terms of I don't think that the money fetish in itself is a constant in time. So somehow we have built systems around it that people seem across the board, seem to trust the financial numbers, these symbols more than physical reality.
Alan Ware (00:58:54):
I think as you mentioned, design and disaster, and plenty of disasters could evaporate those money tokens and leave a real physical nature.
Mathis Wackernagel (00:59:05):
Again, whether we get there through disaster or design, the fear of disasters may get us to design too, so that we don't necessarily have to live through a disaster. I would say a disaster doesn't necessarily bring out the best in us necessarily, so we can produce a lot of damage. I dunno, I'm just saying this I see as a possibility. So it's not, the grip of money is not an infinite constant.
Alan Ware (00:59:26):
Yeah, and I like your talking about motivation and that we've seen people be motivated to have smaller families over the last 60 years going from five to a little over two. So that's been desire and agency of women mainly and men. And yet now we're seeing this increasing fertility decline alarmism as it applies to threatening economic growth in high income countries and even some low income countries. And we were wondering, you get around the world, you talk to a lot of different policymakers. How do you respond to those alarmist concerns about fertility decline? Do you hear that much? And if you do, what do you say?
Mathis Wackernagel (01:00:06):
It is so odd. I mean probably any kind of crazy thing is best approached with curiosity and say, what exactly is your concern here? Because, I mean, overall I think from just a mathematical perspective, obviously, I mean one is the resource side. But even if you look at it from a dependency ratio, as societies get more technologically advanced, the effort it takes to get the young people to become marginally productive is probably higher than looking after an old person, because many old people become more self-sufficient and live healthier lives longer. So even from a dependency ratio, slightly declining populations may have an economic advantage.
Alan Ware (01:00:43):
So you've also mentioned that if you were president of the World Bank or the head of a development agency, the first thing you would do is dedicate one of your office walls to a large printout of a diagram you created that shows a comparison of the Human Development Index, which is a measure of a country's average level of human development in health, education, and standard of living. So human development index on one axis and on the other ecological footprint. Why do you think that comparison is so crucial?
Mathis Wackernagel (01:01:14):
Yes. I mean, the World Bank doesn't have that much influence, but it's kind of a symbol of a development theory, and I think they stand for a better world where people can live well. What actually do we mean by that? They still, I think, are pretty much addicted to GDP. So ultimately I think the big question is, given that we have so much planet and given that we want to have great lives, are we moving in this direction? Now, what does great lives mean? We can have debates. The United Nations, they say it's more than GDP. They have the Human Development Index. You look at longevity because that's kind of observable. They say like long lives, that if you produce long lives, that means a lot of institutions must be able to work okay. So we could just use that as less controversial.
But these are the two acts If you talk about sustainable development. We want to be within the means of what the planet can renew. We want to be producing outcomes that are socially desirable. So these two things, and so for every project, it actually would be possible to say, which is the population you are working with and what's the movement you're helping to generate with that population? Is it moving towards that box of high wellbeing, long lives or whatever you want to say within what's resource-wise possible? Are we making them stronger? I think if any development agency that doesn't do that, from my perspective, I would use the word fraudulent. It's not delivering to what they say they would deliver. I haven't found one yet that does that.
Alan Ware (01:02:35):
And what I appreciate about your diagram that corresponds with some of the income and life satisfaction or happiness, there's a definite leveling off. When you're very low on ecological footprint, the indicators go up very quickly and then there's a leveling off, which shows the kind of diminishing returns.
Mathis Wackernagel (01:02:52):
I'm happy there are sustainable development goals, but they're still encouraging this following the typical development trend of higher life satisfaction and higher resource demand rather than the orthogonal path, which means how can we have better lives with less resource dependence? That's the big intellectual design challenge that we need to crack and I wish that would be written on top of university doors as you enter university. That's the challenge. How can we crack that nut?
Alan Ware (01:03:22):
Because typically there are only one or two countries, right, that are high in development and low eco footprint?
Mathis Wackernagel (01:03:30):
I mean, it's the whole cloud and there's a few droplets of the cloud hovering close to the edge, and the cloud also demonstrates there's a lot of differences for the same level of resource consumption. You can produce quite different outcomes.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:42):
And as you've said a few times today, if you actually consider the nonhuman development index within it, then that quadrant becomes even smaller if you consider biodiversity wellbeing.
Mathis Wackernagel (01:03:55):
That's why we say think inside the box.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:58):
Yeah, true. And you've talked about obviously overshoot being one of humanity's largest risks of the 21st century, and you're talking about how so little is pursued to combat it, and what do you think it would take to address it?
Mathis Wackernagel (01:04:14):
Why is there so little progress? Upton Sinclair wrote a hundred books and was a candidate for governor in California in the 1920s. He said this famous thing, you know, if your salary depends on not understanding, it's very hard to understand. And I think we know too much about sustainability, just the wrong things. And so I think it is kind of about the collective story of this kind of the moral charitable framing that has such a big hold on our brain that we cannot hear another view - that actually it's not about charitable, it's about necessary. It's in your interest. And so that's why me personally, I now work much more focused on what are audiences that clearly can see the benefit from hearing the story. Because even though I think it's a benefit to everybody, many just don't see the benefits. It's not about whether I think it's beneficial to them. It's whether they think it's beneficial to them that makes the difference.
(01:05:06):
So that's why, for example, we engage much more with countries that have ecological reserves, because they can see that they're being 'had' in some ways. So if you see overshoot as actually market failure, which it is say, wow, use so much more than what earth can renew, then the question becomes, if it's a market failure, how much higher would the price need to be for what biocapacity provides that the demand would go down to a level that would be able to be maintained. And that because its resource use is so inelastic, the price increase would need to be tremendous and it would actually crash the global economy and say, wow, what does that say about an economy that cannot afford its inputs? That's basically the situation we're in. It's not surprising, but that's what we're in. But still that difference in price is what these countries leave on the table overall, you could say.
(01:05:49):
So they say, oh yeah, we are being had. What would need to change in some ways? So how does that have to be? And that would be good for everyone because those who depend on these resources elsewhere also would want to make sure that the supply is maintained. So overuse is dangerous. That's kind of my response in terms of only where can you get more of a hearing, but the question is, why does overshoot have so little resonance? Is it perhaps too abstract? But then I mean, carbon footprint is pretty abstract. I mean, I think carbon footprint is even more abstract than overshoot, so that doesn't fully explain it. So that's something I'm happily kind of inquiring and still it kind of piques my curiosity. I dunno.
Nandita Bajaj (01:06:27):
It sounds like we're going to have to do a round two with you when you have figured out the answer.
Mathis Wackernagel (01:06:35):
Yeah, or you may have figured it out as you talk with more people on overshoot. Then please give me a call.
Nandita Bajaj (01:06:39):
Well, it is helpful to talk to so many different people who are working on different aspects of the issue and to help connect the dots, but it has been such a pleasure having you with us today, Mathis. Thank you so much for giving so much of your time. You took the conversation in so many directions and explained so many concepts very, very well. Yeah, we really appreciate all the great work that you're doing, and really wonderful to have you kind of within our circle.
Alan Ware (01:07:09):
Yes, thank you.
Mathis Wackernagel (01:07:10):
Thank you Nandita and Alan for your efforts and wonderful contribution to the world.
Alan Ware (01:07:15):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:07:44):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.
