Danny Matheis
6 September 2020
Earthweek Ending August 28th
Overshoot Day
This section talked about Overshoot Day, which is the point in the year when the whole world
has used up more ecological resources than our planet can produce in a single year. For this year,
Overshoot Day happened to fall on August 22. The date of Overshoot Day had been constantly
getting sooner in the year, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been less being
taken away from nature. This just so happened to push back the date this year by a little more
than three whole weeks. When looking at the actual website for Overshoot Day, it explains that
the date is set by the Global Footprint Network, who calculates the number of days that Earth’s
biocapacity can provide for humanity’s Ecological Footprint. Since 2019, the forest products
footprint dropped by 8.4%, the carbon footprint dropped by 14.5%, and the food footprint
happened to be unchanged. Overall, it was discovered by the Global Footprint Network that
humans were using up all of Earth’s ecological resources without being replaced as early as
1970.
Source: https://www.overshootday.org/2020-calculation/
Polio Eradication
This section discusses how the entire continent of Africa has been declared free from the polio
virus by the World Health Organization. Over the past four years, there haven’t been any more
recorded cases of the virus in Africa. With this being said, only two countries now remain
impacted by the polio virus, and those countries are Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although, both