Featured Interview

Mathis Wackernagel

Mathis Wackernagel

Founder and President

Global Footprint Network

Balancing Our Account with Nature by Design and Not by Disaster

How can we live well within nature’s planetary boundaries? Arguably, this is one of the most important questions for our world to answer today. The Global Footprint Network was founded over 30 years ago by Mathis Wackernagel, currently the President, to help individuals, communities and countries calculate their global consumption of natural resources.

According to Mathis, once we understand our Global Footprint and how we are extracting natural resources; then we can better budget and manage our resource use to ensure that we both live high quality lives; but don’t overshoot our annual natural budget by more than 1 Planet worth of resources.  Let’s listen to Mathis and learn how we can better adapt our lives to get to a sustainable world by innovative design; and not disaster.

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Ecological Footprint

We use future resources to run the present, using more than Earth can replenish. Like any such scheme, this works for a limited time, followed by a crash.

Earth Overshoot

This year, 2019, in less than eight months, humanity has exhausted Earth’s budget for the year. Our earth overshoot day was July 27, 2019. That means that we have used all the natural capital in our 1 planet limited resource base 4 months before the end of the year. Now we are in a nature deficit, depleting our account. 

Global Footprint Network

Ecological Footprint accounting, first introduced in the 1990s and continuously developed, continues to be the only metric that compares overall human demand on nature with what our planet can renew ― its biocapacity ― and distils this into one number: how many Earths we use.

What To Do?

Ramping up for the 2020-2030 decade of the Anthropocene century to bring back the Garden of Eden, what will you do cut your emissions in half? Go electric? Eat health, waste free diets? Travel light? Build smart? Share on your Social Media,

hashtag #mynaturalintelligence

Catherine Cunningham, PhD

CEO, Natural Intelligence Media

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