Overshoot Days

Sustainability is the wise, fair, equal, and frugal use of our planetary resources. Overshoot Days, a series of six wearable sculpture neckpieces, maps the frightening way that five countries, and the earth as a whole, use up 365 days’ worth of resources in far less time during 2021 and 2022.

Overshoot Days is a concept that calculates the time it takes for an individual nation to use up a year’s worth of resources. Carefully calculated using scientific and environmental methods, it clearly demonstrates that many countries, mostly in the West, use up their yearly allocation in far less time. The worst during 2022, Qatar, only took 41 days, less than a month and a half to do that. The United States of America took 72 while Australia was only 10 days later. The United Kingdom took 139 days and China, 153 days. Once the individual nations have been collected and calculated, an average for the whole earth can be determined. For 2021, the Earth’s Overshoot Day was the 29th July, taking 210 days to use up 365 days’ worth of planetary resources.

While many countries take far longer to use up their resources, many of these have large portions of the population living in abject, absolute poverty. Many are in Africa and Asia.

It is easy to identify the reality that this is not sustainable. If the planet’s population uses its resources too quickly, it fails to give the earth time to renew those, if they can be renewed at all. If all humans lived like Qatar, we would need almost nine planets to survive. If we all lived like Australians, we would need just under four and a half planet Earths.

But we only have one Earth.

Humanity’s overpopulation means we need to radically examine how we consume the Earth’s resources. If we want all people on the planet to live like Australians, the earth could only sustain around a billion people. If the seven billion people we have now want to live equally and have access to the same resources, then we would have to live like Eastern Europeans. If the 14 billion who are estimated to populate the planet by 2050 all want the same resources, we would all have to live like sub-Saharan Africans.

The problem with this scenario is that the world does not share resources equally. The wealthier, Western nations, tend to take more and use far more than others, often at the very expense of the poorer nations.

2022

Sterling Silver, Powder Coated Aluminium, X-Rays, Haematite, Nylon.

3 x 3 x 60cm ea