According to Global Footprint Network, August 8th was Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humanity had used up its natural resources budget for the entire year, with carbon sequestration making up more than half of the demand on nature. I have been an environmental activist for the past 10 years and my activism has led me to the understanding that this is the most important issue facing us on the planet. I now speak wherever and whenever I can on the importance of looking after earth, our only home… and the only one that I know of with chocolate!
As Overshoot Day is a good time to bring awareness to looking after our planet, I organized an event at Turning the Tide, our community bookstore. That evening we shared our stories, our ideas and our desires on how to get back to community living. Very important was to create awareness, to engage others and our governments on the importance of looking after nature, about planting trees, and about cleaning up our air, our water and our land from pollution.
We talked about how we were handling this in our own lives and about how to talk to others, to rally, to protest, or possibly to gather in civil disobedience? Tom and Linda who are originally from Saskatoon and now are managing and restoring a rain forest in Costa Rica were saying that Costa Rica has the Right to a Healthy Environment in it’s Constitution and because of that people hold themselves and their government to a higher environmental standard.
We ended the evening with a helpful tip that everyone could do to take the strain off of our earth’s natural resources – we could all do 20 % less of our spending, actually of everything, which would then make room for time with nature, and with family and friends.
For humanity to thrive we need to get back to “one planet living”!