Overshoot Debt Rhymes with Extinction Debt
Per AI aggradation:
In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to past events. It’s also known as “dead clade walking” or “survival without recovery”.
Extinction debt is a time-lagged process that can take hundreds of years to pay off. It’s caused by a time lag between an event, such as habitat destruction or climate change, and the subsequent disappearance of species.
For example, a endemic tree on an island depended on Dodo birds to disperse their seeds. Some of the trees still live, have yet to pay their debt.
And ‘overshoot debt’ is, per AI:
Earth Overshoot Day, also known as Ecological Debt Day, is the day when humanity’s demand for resources exceeds the Earth’s ability to regenerate them. This day is calculated by dividing the planet’s biocapacity by humanity’s ecological footprint, and multiplying it by 365.
The correct answer would be that ‘overshoot debt’ refers to a condition that modern humans cannot understand because their livelihood (exploiting a planetary larder of nonrenewables to make rebuildables for a time) requires them to not understand.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair 1934.
On a small scale of one population (e.g. a wolf pack) living within a habitat whose environmental productivity (e.g. lichens that feed reindeer), K-strategists (e.g. wolves) avoid overshooting the lower limits of carrying capacity as doing so always incurs harm (food becomes increasingly in short supple due to a longage of demand — e.g. too many wolves).
Overshooting the lower limit causes stress. The K-strategist's evolved response to stress is the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), which by whatever means (varies with species) reduces fertility, stopping any increase in population followed by population reduction until demands on environmental resources do not exceed supply (stress ends, prosperity returns, the seeming abundance of reindeer make for easy hunting).
Over hundreds of millions of years, K-strategists who avoid overshooting the upper limit of carrying capacity prosper (are selected for) long term. The point at which increasing harm due to exceeding the lower limits exceeds the decreasing short-term benefit defines the upper limit.
K-strategists who fail to remain under the upper limit incur an overshoot debt payable in descent that degrades the environment/habitat (carrying capacity) and if the harm to the habitat is enough, the overshoot species risks extinction (e.g. reindeer put on a predator-free island).
The harm incurred is in proportion to the extent of their overshoot (a debt posterity and those who incurred the debt who live long enough must pay). Extinction may not be the outcome of an overshoot debt, but there is never a net benefit, hence exceeding upper carrying capacity limits has no pay-off for K-strategist species.
Exceeding the upper limit always ends up doing more harm than good to the species (is selected against) and results in degradation of the habitat for that species and many others. One harm that can be incurred is extinction of the species (and others) that overshoots the upper limit of carrying capacity, thereby degrading it. Regionally, we have been degrading the planets since developing agriculture (plant and animal domesticants), and globally over the last 300 years.
Only a few species (e.g. locust, yeast — who are r-strategists) are adapted to overshoot, and so can do it over and over without incurring an overshoot debt whose payment (die-off) risks the extinction of the overshooting species (locust undergo vast morphological and behavioral changes such that some return to living within limits for some years while environmental productivity is restored allowing for another plague-phase event of overshoot and collapse — and yeast sporulate).
Humans cannot sporulate, filling the environment with dormant copies of themselves that await conditions for another bout of exponential growth. Humans only began experimenting with short-term maximizing of self interest as an obligate invasive species about 75k years ago when the solution to overshooting the environmental productivity of a valley was to look beyond (on a flat earth’s illimitable plane) and see another valley, region, continent, and planet for the taking. A culture of taking has worked for 75k years…, but there is no planet B.
Some modern humans can imagine that they went into overshoot about 1970 when the human population was only 3,695,390,336 (another AI/human hallucination, but 3.7 billion is close enough). If so, then 3.7 billion modern humans, whose demands for ever increasing per capita consumption (vastly more than in 1970) could be sustainably supported forever (but as 10 billion people could live comfortably in Texas, hundreds of billions could live on earth prior to constructing our Dyson sphere that could house trillions). The belief that the Gaian system could sustainably support 3.7 billion modern humans even without increasing per capita consumption above 1970 levels, is inecolate.
Our condition of modernity (and being modern humans) depends upon our not understanding that we began incurring the overshoot debt posterity will pay about 3k to 4k years ago, if not several millennia before.
For a brief moment, the few freaks who may read this far may think they want to understand why a long-term human population could be as high as 7–35 million, but your condition of being a modern human prevents you from understanding, so never mind and it won’t matter (to Gaia). Enjoy life while you can.
Music comes from human prattle that only modern human ears can Like and Share, and the rest comes from Nature, a different drummer that all evolvable forms of life dance with the system to (i.e. those who are thought to be insane — or mere animals — by Moderns).