Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday. The most
dominant species in Earth's history, in other words, is living beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in. At its current pace of consumption humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated. Earth's seven billion denizens -- nine billion by mid-century -- are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said. At the same time, we are disgorging more CO2, pollutants and
chemical fertilizers than the atmosphere, soil and oceans can soak up without severely disrupting the
ecosystems that have made our planet such a comfortable place for homo sapiens to live.
Counting down from January 1, the date when human activity exceeds its budget -- dubbed "Earth Overshoot Day" -- had receded by about three days each year since 2001.
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