The Utah Population and Environment Coalition claims that Utah's people demand more from Mother Earth than the state's biosphere can sustain. We are, they say, living beyond our environmental means.
That deficit can only be made up two ways. We can take more than our fair share of resources from other people, or we can deplete our own state's resources to the point that we will leave those who come after us with an ever-worsening environmental dilemma that presumably will become irreversible.
Not a pretty picture.
If it is true.
We can't say for certain that it is. The coalition's methodology is based on something called an ecological footprint. It attempts to calculate how much Utahns consume in food, housing, energy and other commodities and compares that to the land's renewable biological capacity. Researchers made those calculations for the years 1990 and 2003.
Obviously that is a complex undertaking. Did they get it right? We can't be sure.
Intuitively, however, given what everyone can see all around us - the increasing stress that the Utah and world populations are placing on supplies of clean water, air, forests, fossil fuels, sea life and other creatures - our gut says they are right.
The researchers concluded that in 1990, when Utah's population was only 1.7 million, the state actually was running an ecological surplus. But that was not true of 2003's burgeoning population of 2.4 million, which was running a deficit of 11 percent. Today, the "overshoot," as the coalition calls it, presumably would be even bigger.
What are some solutions? Round up the usual suspects. Reduce family size. Recycle materials. Buy local food first (it cuts down on fuel consumption). Drive less, take public transit, use more fuel-efficient cars. Diversify energy sources in favor of renewables. Insulate. Live closer together. Don't build McMansions. Use green building materials.
Even the most tolerant mother will only allow errant children to run up debts for so long. Eventually, she will be bankrupt. And they will starve and die.
