September 26, 2009

Today’s the Day We Overdraw Our Accounts

"You say there's nothing left?" Punch, 1917. Courtesy Project Gutenberg.

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Thanks to Deborah Byrd blogging at EarthSky for the heads-up that today is Earth Overshoot Day. The day when we overdraw our ecological bank account.

This year it falls on 25 September. Starting today, we’re utilizing resources at a rate faster than what the planet can regenerate in a calendar year.

Which means for the next 97 days, we’re using up our capital investment. You know, the air, waters, oceans, forests, species, topsoil that keep us alive. The problem’s called ecological overshoot.

We first went into overshoot in 1986, according to the Global Footprint Network. Before then we consumed resources and produced carbon dioxide at a rate consistent with what the planet could produce and reabsorb in a year. By 1996 we were using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply. Earth Overshoot Day fell in November that year.

Now we’re now stripping resources 40 percent faster than the planet can produce them.

‘Course a thrifty Homo sapiens would batten down the hatches, tighten the belt, and shift to extreme emergency savings mode. Unless he or she didn’t really feel overdrawn? Like everything was still super affordable and super expendable and super infinite?
 

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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