By: Susie Hairston

Earth Overshoot Day quietly slipped by without fanfare this July 24, 2025. But it is a day that we need to get loud about, though not in a celebratory way. Earth Overshoot Day is the day when globally we have used up more resources than the planet can regenerate and created more waste than it can absorb in a year.

The idea of Earth Overshoot Day originated with economist Edward Sims in 2006 as a way to educate the world about our rapid depletion of Earth’s resources. The date is calculated by Global Footprint Network, an international research organization focused on keeping us from exceeding Earth’s ecological limits. The Global Footprint Network compares our ecological footprint (how much we use up/waste) with the Earth’s ability to regenerate resources in order to arrive at a date for overshoot.

The calculations are complicated, so the specific overshoot date arrived at each year is debatable. However, while the actual date may vary based on data and calculation methods, the fact that we are using more resources than can be regenerated is not in dispute, and designating an Earth Overshoot Day each year serves as a useful tool to educate and inspire us to consume and waste less.

The idea of Earth Overshoot Day can be made clearer with an analogy. If you had a retirement account that you needed to live off for many years to come, and you withdrew and spent all the interest it had made the first year at just over seven months into the year, you would now have to start using the principal in order to pay to keep yourself alive. This of course results in a smaller amount of money invested, which in turn results in less interest accumulated the following year that will result in you having to cut into the principal to pay your bills earlier than the previous year, thus depleting what you have to live off even more. Eventually, you will have used up all of the money you originally had, and you will still need to buy food and clothing and pay for a place to live, but you will have nothing to do that with. This is what we are doing to the planet we are living on and what Earth Overshoot Day is trying to bring attention to: using up everything faster than it can be replenished.

This is a helpful analogy, but it falls short because we don’t really need money to live. We need food. We need water and a safe place to live. Without money, you still have the possibility of getting a job to get more money or getting help from a relative who feeds you and gives you a place to stay. You are not out of options if you completely deplete your retirement account. But when we’ve used up/polluted all the drinkable water, for example, we will not be able to survive.