Home & Garden
Earth reaches Plastic Overshoot Day
Landmark date reveals the moment humanity can no longer properly manage its annual plastic waste.
5 September 2025
This article first appeared in our COP30 special issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Everything we have ever built, owned, worn, eaten or loved has come from nature.
Every building, smartphone, car, diamond, loaf of bread and sip of wine – all of it – has been drawn from the living body of our planet.
For centuries, we’ve treated that abundance as infinite; we’ve plundered forests, mined mountains and trawled oceans under the illusion that progress meant profit and that nature was an external resource.
Now the balance sheet has changed, because we’re taking more from Earth each year than she can regenerate.
‘Earth Overshoot Day’ marks the date by which humans have used more resources than the planet can provide in a given year.
This year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on 24 July; since that date we have been living in ecological deficit.
If a business behaved like that, it would be bankrupt.
For some reason, when it comes to nature we behave like the account will never run dry.
We call the crisis ‘climate change’ or ‘biodiversity loss’; these are very real issues that affect millions of lives, but they are symptoms of a deeper issue. The root cause is disconnection.
At some stage in human development we stopped seeing ourselves as part of nature; we forgot that the air in our lungs, the water in our blood, the microbes in our gut and the soil beneath our feet are all interconnected.
When we choose to reconnect we are not indulging a luxury; studies show that time in nature reduces cortisol, boosts immunity and improves mental health
When we walk barefoot on the earth, when we watch a sunrise or listen to birds singing, our nervous systems remember, and we reawaken a reverence that’s powerful enough to change our behaviour in a profound way.
As world leaders convene for COP30 in Brazil, it’s important to recognise we need that shift more than ever.
Decisions made at this climate conference will determine whether we continue the extractive story of the last 300 years or begin a new chapter, with reconnection as its central theme.
That’s why I’m an OMMMbassador; OMMM is a movement – ‘One Mind, Many Mothers’ – with a mission to restore sacred relationship with the Earth.
Its purpose is to curate events and employ the arts to awaken consciousness, and create spaces where humans and nature can remember each other again.
Nature doesn’t need us to fix her; she needs us to stop pretending we’re separate.
Give her space, respect and time, and she will regenerate with breathtaking grace.
Forests regrow. Rivers cleanse. Species return. Life finds a way, if we let it.
This is the lesson I wish every leader would carry to COP30: we don’t need to save the planet, we need to stop destroying the systems that sustain us.
Imagine diverting the trillions we pour into fossil fuels into soil regeneration, renewable energy, Indigenous stewardship and biodiversity credits.
Imagine if we measured the health of ecosystems as our true wealth.
If we each choose to give back more than we take – in gratitude, in resources, in attention – then there’s still hope.
Our survival depends not on how much we can extract, but how deeply we can remember that we are nature, too.
Landmark date reveals the moment humanity can no longer properly manage its annual plastic waste.
24 July 2025 is the day we used up all nature’s resources for the year.
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