The Organic Pizza Dilemma E-Book

Robin Haring

• Herausgeber: REDLINE Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A POSITIVE BUT HONEST LOOK AT THE FUTURE AND OUR ROLE IN IT In today's climate crisis, things need to change. However, in trying to save the whales and the rain forest, it far too often seems like our choices are limited to buying sustainable and fair products. But do we even know which of our products count as such? Does the label »organic« on our pizza-box truly mean that this is the right choice? Or is it just another way to pressure us consumers in feeling like each of our choices will have a direct effect on the future of planet earth? The authors show how navigating the current world of certified labels can often leave one feeling pressured, frustrated and confused. They help the readers find their own form of sustainable living that can be both enriching and fulfilling. With its informed analysis of the current situation, its practical tips, and its helpful insights, this book encourages the reader to live a more enjoyable and sustainable life. After all, what is good for the world is good for us all!

Leseprobe

Thekla Wilkening Robin Haring

The Organic Pizza Dilemma

Thekla Wilkening Robin Haring

The Organic Pizza Dilemma

The Surprising Guide to Sustainability

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie. Detailed bibliographical information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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1st Edition 2023

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© of the original edition 2021 by Redline Verlag, Münchner Verlagsgruppe GmbH, Munich

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Translation: Maud van Lier

Cover Illustrations: bsd/ Shutterstock

Illustrations: Lotta Meyer

eBook: ePUBoo.com

ISBN Print 978-3-86881-935-9

ISBN E-Book (PDF) 978-3-96267-521-9

ISBN E-Book (EPUB, Mobi) 978-3-96267-522-6

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Table of Contents

Chaos

Inspiration

Curiosity

Departure

1 x 1 Dinner Party

Seek confidence - offer a future

Onwards, always onwards

It is not your fault

Made by human

The opposite of sustainability is trying to be sustainable

Always just polar bears

We are the 0.01%

A shared earth

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter!

Straight through the night

Green regeneration and the world after

Nevertheless, we have a consumption problem

The dark side of fashion

Lobbyism or the story of shark finning

Drafts

Dance like nobody’s watching

The basics

Your Ikigai

No man is an island

Yoga

We have everything you need

Body

Resistance (a short history of non-violent protests)

Fashion revolution or don’t forget the music

Things that might not save the world but are good nonetheless

Mindfulness

Anohni

Flowers do not bloom full year either

Stopping or preparing

The utopia of a plastic-free bathroom

The future are spaces

Going local

The costs of freedom

The future of fashion

Think community

Hi, politics!

Me, you, us, citizens

Breaks in the timeline

There is no right life in the wrong one

Your first cruelty-free dinner party

Status quo: The ecological footprint

In the future: The social handprint

Relationships between love and death

Make everything NEW

All solutions are there

Epilogue

About the authors

References

Notes

To Melitta

Chaos

Inspiration

In 2012 I started my very first company: Kleiderei. This I did with Pola Fendel, who has been my partner-in-crime since my final year of high school in Cologne. In summer, just about a year after I had arrived in the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Pola and I found ourselves sitting in the kitchen of some friends. I was in my first semester, studying Clothing Technology at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, while Pola had chosen the arts for her study there. It was a fun evening that would change the course of our lives. It started out as a joke, a misunderstanding. Somebody told, how he had picked up his girlfriend from the fashion department of the library. However, the people present, being rather tipsy, thought he meant that she had borrowed clothes there.

Kleiderei – the bookshop for clothes, was born. The very next day I called Pola – I could not wait to make this project a reality. To borrow clothes was for me the solution to save resources, to consume in a sustainable way and to still experiment with fashion. All the solutions, to which I had neither found in my training nor in my studies, at once. And Pola was all in, as the free spirit that she was, forever looking for new adventures. Kleiderei was our new adventure and our new mission. The last five years we already had exactly done what we wanted and now we did it again: we started a company.

Kleiderei works like a library, but for clothes. We have lent clothes to customers for a monthly subscription. First in small stores at St. Pauli in Hamburg – later throughout Germany. Kleiderei was for us the alternative to a throw-away society.

This is how far we got by ourselves in 2012, exactly ten years ago now, in expressing our vision in words. Micha, the journalist who wrote a piece about us for the magazine Brand Eins, brought us new concepts, like ›collaborative consumerism‹ or ›share economy‹. He had his own theory, according to which we were currently at the start of a new wave, a new change, because we had felt something: We no longer wanted to own those things, most of all fashion, that we bought just because of desire (maybe even just out of lust) rather than because of need. We were not sure if others felt the same way, but, well, we were pretty sure this was the case.

In May of 2013, a full half year after founding Kleiderei, the piece was published. It was double paged with pictures of Pola and me – and my mini baby tummy. We were in the middle of it all. We were invited to a conference in Berlin as keynote speakers, besides companies such as Spotify and Airbnb, and the moderator asked us what someone must do to appear on a double page in the Brand Eins. Years later he visited us in Hamburg, during a month-long period in which we organized events at the Mercedes Me Store for the theme ›Slow Fashion‹. His question was the same: How did you do it? We did not know it ourselves. To us, the simple explanation was that we were young and that our intuitions matched the spirit of our time.

Or… maybe we were so successful by questioning this ›Zeitgeist‹.

With Kleiderei we advanced in the, at that time and in the truest sense of the word, rather ›colorless‹ world of sustainable fashion. In 2012 there was truly not much. If so, then the pioneers of Hessnatur, a couple of visionaries like Patagonia in the outdoors section. Still, Armedangels was still relatively small and we could have only dreamed of something as cool as Jan’n June. Secondhand clothing had by that time become less and less popular, as it was mainly associated with the older generation of the environmentally friendly than the young and the hip. To us it was immediately clear: We need colors. And sexiness. That was the vision for our CI, our Corporate Identity: Cool girls (part, of course, from our friend circle), who were all intelligent and therefore preferred to consume sustainably – but who still looked sexy. Basically, we asked ourselves: What is it that we want to see ourselves? What would inspire us?

I would have liked to stop here and be able to say: This is by now old news. Today we find ourselves in quite a different situation since we have come so much further. However, except for the size of the Armedangels company, this is not true.

It seems that people, just like before, are lost in a world that tells us that consumption makes us happy. Maybe with the small difference that today there is something like the ›perfect buy‹. It can primarily be found in the big cities or online, under the heading ›bio‹, ›fair‹ or ›vegan‹, with a nice logo next to it. But don’t be fooled. These logos are not like the stickers of the bands that we love and put on our laptops. Rather, they are authentication stamps.

Authentication stamps that help us to choose between right and wrong, where what is ›right‹ and ›wrong‹ is understood by no one and felt by even less. This has led to massive confusion caused by the sheer immensity of available authentication stamps, for which websites have emerged to help us to make some sense of them. What complicates matters is that just as we can each start our own band and ›define‹ our own music style; companies can create their own authentication stamp or authentical claim of sustainability. Thus, we can find happy green stickers on jeans today that say ›better‹. Better than in the past, yes, but what does this ›better‹ actually mean and is it already good enough?

There is no patent on the notion of ›sustainability‹ or ›bio‹, no accepted definition that we can all follow.

The idea for this book took shape when my friend Cecilia posted a photo of a pizza advertisement on Instagram: ›Vegan Yoga Pizza‹. The subtitle of the packaging read ›with a sauce of hummus and ayurvedic spices‹, with next to it two authentication stamps: ORGANIC and VEGAN. And a third, which said ›5 cents for healthy soils. Such a pizza advertisement lends itself well for an evening of a drinking-game or bingo: »vegan« – check, »yoga« – check, »organic« – check. BINGO! Burp.

I am not saying that choosing a pizza is easy. We have all spent hours scanning through pizza flyers to find the one pizza we want. During our times at Kleiderei, pizza was our go-to meal. When we still had our first store at St. Pauli, we would always get the mini pizza from the wood-burning stove at the pizzeria Alt Hamburg. We didn’t even have to enter the restaurant itself but could order at a little bar outside of it. The wood-oven pizza would be prepared directly under our nose. This was practical, as chronically time depraved young entrepreneurs. But more about this more later. Let’s return to the pizza: crisp, fresh, with a great taste and until today a cult favorite at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. After we went online with Kleiderei and moved our headquarters to Hammerbrook, we kept ordering pizza when we worked late hours on our business ideas (or on our taxes).

Spicy pepperoni or no pepperoni? On a pizza, things that we normally would not eat taste great. Take anchovies for example. Choosing the topics to go on the pizza was always a battle. I once had a roommate in Cologne that managed to tell me at every pizza-party in our kitchen that, originally, just tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil should go on a pizza. It will probably come as no surprise to you that he always thought we were too loud at these pizza-parties. A fitting response to this was made by Sophie Passmann in her novel Komplett Gänsehaut: »Since a couple of years ago, whenever someone was eating a pizza, assholes would tell that person that pizza originally was food for poor people. A few years later these same assholes have opened pizza places that put goat cheese, red beets, and honey on pizzas, and in case someone wants it roasted pine nuts as well. By now, these poor people can no longer afford pizza.«

Pizza is there for everyone! Nothing works better for a hangover than a pizza. Nothing offers more comfort on the couch. And nothing will tell you more about a personality. Steady or fearful people will always order the same pizza (given that consistency and fear are not that different from one another). Wild people love to try something new and are of course sometimes disappointed too, although they do not really care about that. Very insecure people are more often disappointed by their choice and the only free topping one can find on their pizza is food envy. The smart ones among us immediately make sure that they find a partner to exchange slices with or they will order a half/half pizza to lower the risk of severe disappointment. We don’t want to regret anything anyways.

The great thing about pizza is the same as with many other Guilty Pleasures: basically, it makes any form of bodily movement very unlikely – it is a form of slowing down, which can be quite a relief (and therefore something we want).

The post of Cecilia showed a pizza that had no longer anything to do with a Guilty Pleasure, but which instead has turned into a Organic Pizza Dilemma that is only interested in telling you the right way. This post was a tipping point for us and we wanted to write something that provided a different perspective on this whole perfect consumption blabla. That which had started once as a good thing, with products from the Demeter-farm, had by now turned into a production line that was as opaque and commercial as the conventional industry. And just as it is not true that everything bio is healthy – and therefore of course doesn’t make you gain weight – is it also not true that everything is ›great‹ as soon as the label ›bio‹ is attached to it. Why not? Because bio itself does not mean that people working on the production line are paid fairly. And the other way around. More about this later…

We are maybe just a small slice of this pizza that we call ›crisis‹. Environmental crisis, climate crisis, human rights crisis, economic crisis. All those. But how big is our slice? We, citizens who have by now become consumers, are told by a whole industry that it is our responsibility. It is our Organic Pizza Dilemma! But what if this is not true? What if this responsibility lies only in part with us? This is something we want to explore.

And there is more. Just as with our favorite pizza-topping, every person should strive for her or his own sustainability. For some it’s about small changes in daily routines, for others it’s a whole new life.

This book would like to encourage you to find your own sustainability.

Curiosity

In the first place it is about finding out what is good for you. For you, personally. Nobody knows what ›perfect‹ consumerism is and how much influence we have anyways. A popular saying in social networks is that ›your bill is your vote‹. But is there even a choice in this vote? Or is our bill in the end just our opinion? And can opinions change socio-economic structures?

Certainly, perfect sustainable consumerism is not the solution. This way you can only go wrong. And no one, believe it, truly no one, knows what the right way is. So, if someone at the next house-party explains to you how someone can become a decent vegan or that oat milk is so much better than almond milk or soy milk, just thank them politely and go.

Departure

Why this book?

Thekla: I was 17 when I knew that I wanted to change the fashion industry radically. Concretely, this meant for me: Implementing sustainability. I had a vision, a goal, a task, and I was still very young. I know that this happens rarely and that I have been inconceivably lucky as well.

Today people often tell me that they do not know where to start their sustainable consumerism. They then ask me as well if there even is a way to do it perfectly, because they are afraid that it will not matter anyways. They cannot save the world every day, but should try to do so, right? I write this book most of all for them. And for you. Because since you are holding this book in your hand, I suspect that you already possess the curiosity that we need for a change.

In the first place I was lucky to feel at 17 what was right for me. And what is right for you, is also good for the world – and this book is about this connection. This book is full of inspirations for more sustainability. At the same time, it is so handy that you can carry it with you every day wherever you go. It should be your continuing guide in the search of your path for a good life, for you and your environment.

Robin: For a couple of years now, I have been asking students in my seminars the same question: ›Is the world improving or ending?‹.

The answer is always the same: The world is ending! Once, my 8-year-old daughter sat in the seminar as well, surrounded by colorful pens, and decidedly stated: ›The world is improving!‹.

Since then, I have been thinking about why precisely most of the youngest members of this prospering generation are convinced that their world is ending. Are we really living in a society without hope for a better future?

1 x 1 Dinner Party

Without knowledge we can only see incomplete.1

Franz Berzbach

After finishing high school, I decided to start a training as an assistant in clothes technology. When I picked up my diploma, the director of my high school murmured in a slightly bewildered tone something like: »Such grades … and then a training?«. But I wanted to understand the deeper workings of the textile industry and I thought that a theoretical study would not let me do so. I wanted to learn how to sow, to touch materials, and to start right at the beginning, to gain sufficient knowledge to be able to question the system itself.

This is also how we want to start this book. Beginning with a 1 x 1 dinner party, we introduce you to the seemingly endless universe called »Sustainability«. And, more importantly: we introduce you to some of the limits we have already reached in this universe. This we will do with some humor, since the best recipe for change is humor and we do not want you to get scared. Because fear paralyzes. And we want to act.

Seek confidence - offer a future

And then suddenly someone asks you: Do you feel hopeful when you think about the next 12 months?

For a short moment you pause and wonder: Is there actually something that gives me hope? This question has been asked for several years now by the Allensbach survey institute and recently reached a historical low: in the generation of 30- to 59-year-olds, only 22% felt hopeful when thinking about the next 12 months. To compare, in 2015 this was still an impressive 57%. The general mood has plummeted, mostly because of the unpredictable course of the pandemic and the feeling of uncertainty that has emerged from it. What is more, the Doomsday Clock has become more pressing than ever, standing since January 2022 at a hundred seconds to midnight. Since 1947, this symbolic clock shows the time we have left till the end of the world. At the start of every year, distinguished scientists and Nobel laureates meet to debate the new positions of the Doomsday Clock’s hands. During the last years, the reasons for changing the clock were primarily the nuclear arms race and political conflicts, but climate change is now becoming increasingly worrisome as well. The clock hands have stood for varying reasons on 7 to 12, on 3 to 12 or again on 5 to 12. Today, the hands indicate 100 seconds to midnight and the world is as close to its end as it has never been before.

Let’s listen at this point to the remarkable speech of the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, on »the State of the Planet« in December of 2020 at the Columbia University in New York. No one should listen to the first few minutes of the speech on an empty stomach, especially since after the introductory words »... the state of the planet is broken«, there is a disturbingly lengthy and scary list of the extent to which humans are destroying planet earth.

One million species are at risk of extinction.

Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes.

Deserts are spreading.

Wetlands are being lost.

Every year, we lose 10 million hectares of forests.

Oceans are overfished -- and choking with plastic waste.

Coral reefs are bleached and dying.

Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones, and hurricanes are increasingly the new normal.

In addition, an ongoing stream of new studies, diagnostics, and prognoses on the imminent end of the world is published every week. Here are just some fragments from these dizzying reports that are actually far too abstract for us to truly understand them to their full extent:

Air and water pollution kills 9 million people every year, which is more than six times the number of people that were killed by the Pandemic.

Humus rich soils disappear 10 to 40 times faster than they can be renewed through natural processes.

Since we started recording scientific climatic data in 1850, we have reached the warmest 20 years in the last 22 years.

The number of vertebrates has decreased by 60% since 1970. The number of insects has decreased even more.

In the next 10 years around one million animal- and plant-species will be in danger of becoming extinct.

Let’s summarize again the state of the world by using the words of the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres: »Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal… Human activities are at the root of our descent towards chaos«.

Well, are these the reasons that we are losing hope when looking to the future? Did we truly lose all belief in a future or just our connection to it?

Indeed, someone who no longer feels connected loses interest. And this is the place where we should make a more precise distinction: everyone gets up in the morning because of a belief in the future. If this belief would have been lost, then we would not have gotten up this morning to shower. The one thing that we actually do lose is the interest in a future that is an extension of the present. When tomorrow will look the same as today or yesterday, then this future looks bleak. And the increasing visibility of the negative consequences of our treatment of the world does not help one bit.

Yes, we are losing interest in this kind of future. And yet … our belief in the future has been so unshakeable that it has by now survived many centuries and many end-of-the-world scenarios. In the Book of Revelation, the prophet Johannes already declared that »The time is near«. Since then, the world has (almost) ended uncountable times and in a variety of ways. Again and again, constantly. Basically, the world has always been ending. Just looking at the Doomsday Clock, one could almost think that this conviction of the imminent end of the world is what makes us truly human. However, there will be a future. An unimaginable one maybe, but a future nevertheless.

This fascination with disasters is thus nothing new. In my study of demographics, a beloved practice was to calculate the growth of populations (of cockchafers or deer) in such a way that in the end the whole surface of the earth would be occupied. Forecasts of the 60’s predicted that on the 21st of June 2116 the world population would have increased up to the point that there would only be standing room left for each human.

Alternatively, we could interpret the above-mentioned results of the Allensbach survey as »Zukunfstatheismus« (Atheism of the future), a term coined by the famous philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. With it, Sloterdijk meant the contemporary phenomenon where we are acutely aware of the dangers that our actions pose to the world, but at the same time unable to counter these dangers with political actions or consequences. What we thus seem to have lost is the belief that we can shape the future.

The yearly notice of my pension insurance states as the official date of the start of my retirement the year 2048. Every year I find this notice in my mailbox and ask myself the same two questions: 2048 - what will still come my way? (the unplannable) and what awaits me? (the unforeseeable).

It seems we still have some curiosity and interest left for our personal life. However, for humanity, we are sketching with the help of pressing numbers and dark scenarios an image of the future that shows a ransacked and broken planet. Scientifically speaking and analyzed in soberly fashion, the most likely scenario is that human civilization ends in the year 2050 (Spratt, 2019). Have we truly lost the hope to shape the future of our world?

One question - three answers

What gives you hope?

Thekla:

Okay, honestly: nothing else than the firm resolution to have hope. When it goes wrong (which happens quite often) then I tell myself: it will get better.

Robin:

Many small steps, of many, again and again.

You:

Onwards, always onwards

Okay, just before we begin: How did we get into an environmental and climate crisis in the first place and are there natural limits to growth?

There is just one person that has already visited the future. The Russian astronaut Gennady Padalka holds the current record of longest stay in space: 879 days. According to Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory, we can reach any point in the future by leaving the earth in a spaceship with sufficient speed (close to the speed of light) and then by returning to it afterwards. Since his workplace circles the earth with a speed of 28.000 km/h, astronaut Padalka has traveled a total of 25,5 thousandth of a second forward in time, thereby traveling further into the future than any of us.

More realistic is instead, to try to learn something about the future from the past. Warnings about climate and environment disasters are by now almost 70 years old. Already in the year of 1948 books were published with titles such as »Our Plundered Planet« or »Road to Survival«. The year 1948 is anyways an important date, as precisely at that time a new development began that we now refer to as the »Great Acceleration« (Steffen, 2015). Since the 1950s, we have witnessed a rapid increase of a variety of social, economic, and ecological developments. In parallel, we were living through times in which we have known enough about the state of the earth to be able to do something about it. In a way we have thus already experienced our future: how can we do it differently this time?

From water consumption to paper production and fishing to tourism, species extinction or the use of fertilizers - when we look at a total of 24 human activities, you will notice that each of these progresses exponentially. This means that initially small changes clearly increase over time and that therefore their impacts are easy to underestimate. We know this phenomenon from lessons in mathematics with its well-known example of exponential growth from the story of the ›modest‹ reward for the inventor of the game of chess. Liking this new game a lot, the Indian emperor granted any wish to its inventor. The latter said: »I ask that you grant me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the second square, four for the third and for every further square I ask you to give me twice as many grains as I got for the previous one«. To fill the first row with just 8 of the 64 squares, one needs just 255 rice grains. However, after the initial slow growth, the number of rice grains increases rapidly until it reaches at the 64th square the staggering number of 18 trillion grains of rice or 540 billion tons of rice. The emperor had not anticipated such a growth-rate.

Even before we were able to recognize such man-made trends as being exponential, the Great Acceleration had already been going on for many decades. Health, life-expectancy, education, consumerism, and traveling - all of them higher, faster, further. On their own, these increases have of course brought us many advantages. In the truest sense of the word, we have come far. In his widely acclaimed work »Enlightenment now«, the famous Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker studies our progress by examining a total of 15 different developments, thereby finding 15 very good reasons for a justified and refined optimism about our future. One example is the fact that the child mortality rate for under 5 years olds has been reduced by fifty percent world-wide, from 245 million in 1990 to 122 million in 2017. A sign that we are living healthier, wealthier, and safer lives today. And that while we have also traveled and studied more than any generation that came before us. Progress can spread in big movements like during the industrialization, but it can also proceed quietly and slowly, so that you almost do not notice it. What cannot remain hidden though, is the price of our growth. Exponential advancements like the ones just described make more and more visible to us their social, economic, and ecological costs. We are developing our prosperity at the cost of our planet and we are breaking the wrong records because of it (WMO, 2020): the warmest winter, the strongest hurricane, the hottest year, the highest consumption of water, and the most ice melting, ever.

Crisis means that the situation is especially hard. And we are facing multiple crises. Still, there is a misconception on the kind of crisis that we find ourselves in. More raw material extraction, more energy consumption, more production, more consumerism. The dilemma is that we are exactly following the plan! Our treatment of planet earth did not just happen but is structurally implemented. Our challenge is the dynamics of a structured and resource-based world economy. One good example is the continuing and consistently increasing financial investments in fossil fuels.

Bank Financing of fossil fuels (RAN, 2021)

2015: UN Climate Change Conference in Paris

2016: 640 billion US dollars

2017: 674 billion US dollars

2018: 700 billion US dollars

2019: 736 billion US dollars

This self-reinforcing dynamic was also clearly visible during the first year of the pandemic (2020), when there was a historical decline in global CO2 emissions of -7%. The first lockdown allowed our earth to take a breath. Photos of a smog-free Paris and of the crystal-clear water found in the canals of Venice spread around the world. But we celebrated too soon. Even with the forced break of the pandemic and the short-time hope for a turning-point in the environment and climate crisis, the International Energy Agency stated that »the global emissions in December of 2020 had increased with 2% with reference to that same month last year«.

It was only a short breath. After the global lockdown, the economy immediately started growing again. Moreover, most of the financial aid provided worldwide led to subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption (CSC, 2021). The aid packages worth billions were the perfect opportunity to invest in climate protection and sustainable development - and to thereby motivate change. Still, an evaluation of the University of Oxford in England and of the UN-Environmental Program UNEP shows that the 50 countries with the strongest economies in the world spend 14 billion dollars on aiding the economy in 2020. Of these 14 billion dollars, only about 2,5% was invested in ›Green Recovery‹ (O’Callaghan, 2020). Even when Germany, with a share of about 50%, is one of the pioneers in ecologically oriented stimulus measures, there have been only a few rich countries that have used their aid packages to set the course for a more sustainable development. What a missed chance!

We are living in a contradiction, also known as the ecological paradox (Whitmee, 2015), since the cost for our societal progress of the last two decades is an exponential burden caused by a simultaneous increase in the consumption of our natural resources. We can hold on to the following: What counts as a win for humanity, counts as a loss for our planet. And then again, this means a loss for all of us.

To help us better understand how strongly we influence the various earth-systems like climate, water, or biodiversity, we can make use of the concept of ›planetary boundaries‹ which describes a total of nine critical moments (Steffen, 2015a). Within these boundaries, we obtain those living conditions on the planet Earth that have secured our survival in the last millennia. To this belong(s) the atmosphere that protects us from dangerous radiation, woods that provide us with clean air, sufficient freshwater for drinking, and nutrient-rich soils for the cultivation of food. Since everything, but then absolutely everything, that our society and economy consists of - houses, cars, wine bottles and Legos - originates from natural raw materials of our biosphere, it is only logical that their natural boundaries form the foundation of our survival. By now, however, we have penetrated far into the planetary danger zones, already crossing seven of the nine boundaries. As if we didn’t know any better…

This becomes especially clear when we look at the Earth Overshoot Day that indicates the specific day in a year that a country has consumed all its natural resources necessary for life-support. In Qatar and Luxembourg, these yearly resources were already consumed by mid-February, while in Indonesia or Ecuador they last up to mid-December. The global average of Earth Overshoot Day is on the 22nd of August. On this World Earth Creation Day, humanity has consumed as many natural resources as the earth can restore and that can therefore be consumed in a sustainable way. In Germany, these natural resources are already consumed by the 3rd of May. This means that Germany needs about three earths to get through the whole year. We thus live for the remainder of the year in deficit, in the resources-deficit of our earth.

For decades now, people have been criticizing this overconsumption. One such critique was clearly formulated in a 1972 book and counts by now as a classic in the literature on sustainability. Titled »The Limits to Growth