From “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart” by Brian D. McLaren
In all of these scenarios, the primary problem is not the environment. The primary problem is us. Humans don’t have an environmental problem; the environment has a human problem. (And, we might add, humans have an energy problem, as we’ll see more clearly in chapter 20.) We have built a fast-growing, complex, expensive, unequal, resource-hungry, fragile, fractious, and weaponized civilization that is a threat to both the environment and to itself. As long as we suck resources from the Earth faster than the Earth can restore them, or pump out wastes faster than the Earth can detoxify them, we exist in a condition called “overshoot”.” Whenever our combined human footprint overshoots the Earth’s long-term carrying capacity, we are living on borrowed time and jumping on thin ice. Unless we recalibrate fast, a doom scenario of some sort is inevitable.