From Earth Day to Overshoot The Founding Vision of Colcom Foundation
The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, is commonly remembered as the birth of modern environmentalism. For Colcom Foundation, it is also the origin point of an unfinished argument one that the foundation has built its entire philanthropic mission around completing.
Earth Day 1970 produced genuine legislative and cultural change. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency all followed within a few years. Per capita pollution fell, endangered species found legal protection, and public awareness of ecological fragility grew significantly. The environmental movement, by most accounts, had its moment.
The Overlooked Goal
But Colcom Foundation focuses on what was not accomplished. The original Earth Day platform, the foundation notes, explicitly identified population size as a core environmental variable alongside consumption. That goal was set aside as the movement matured. Colcom Foundation views this as a critical strategic error whose consequences have compounded over fifty years.
The foundation’s accounting of those consequences includes: a 35% per capita reduction in CO2 emissions between 1970 and 2021, overwhelmed by a 62% increase in population that produced a net 15% rise in total emissions. It includes biocapacity consumption climbing from 227% in 1970 to roughly 240% in 2020, despite a 20% fall in per capita resource use. It includes the loss of 2.9 billion North American birds and the halving of wild vertebrate animal populations.
Thinking About What’s Next
Colcom Foundation frames the future in terms of choice. The U.S. population in 1970 stood at 205 million. At the time, the country was already consuming far more than its ecological budget. The population has since grown to 332 million and is projected to reach between 350 and 440 million or higher by 2030 depending on immigration levels. The foundation contends that U.S. citizens have both the right and the responsibility to act collectively to limit the country’s total ecological footprint and that doing so requires honest engagement with how many people are adding to it. Refer to this article to learn more.
Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://www.colcomfdn.org/