Giving Season and a Sustainable Earth
It is giving season, with Giving Tuesday coming up
after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Now is the best time of the year to reach
out to your Donors and make sure that they are thinking of you as they give
thanks for the year and give donations into the end of the tax year. GivingTuesday.org #GivingTuesday
Black Friday is named
such as a target date for companies to move from losing money for the year into
profits: out of the red and into the black. Basically, if you paid all your
expenses at the beginning of the year, all future sales after the break-even
point would be pure profits. Thanksgiving Day, at the end of November is a
wonderful target, that leaves one month of pure profits. Plus, if the last
month of the year is disproportionate – like Christmas sales – that is pure
gravy!
Visit Intellzine.com to see a longer discussion about Nonprofits
using the Giving Tuesday moment to solicit funds from Donors. Some of that
post is repeated here before jumping into a sustainable earth discussion. The Thanks-Shopping-and-Giving Week is an
interesting week:
- Thanksgiving Thursday (in
USA) - Black Friday
- Small Business Saturday
- Sunday Football (or
futbol, same name, different game) - Cyber Monday
- Giving Tuesday
- Buyer’s remorse Wednesday
- Returns Thursday
There’s a similar concept
related to Black Friday, Earth Overshot Day. Earth Overshot Day is the day
(approximately) during the year when the population of the world has exhausted
the resources that the earth produces in a year and we move into deficit
spending (overconsumption). Until a few decades ago, the earth produced far
more that humans (and other living things combined) could consume. Not so now. Earth
Overshoot Day is the day of the year – figuratively – where sustainability stops,
and unsustainable live/living begins for the rest of the year. Guess what day
of the year Earth Overshoot Day occurs? Before or after Black Friday?
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… Wikipedia on Earth Overshoot Day.
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Earth’s “carrying capacity”
has been exceeded since about 1970.
…
Mid-August is now Earth
Overshoot Day. That is with about 1/3 of the year remaining. We need an another
third of an earth to continue living as we are.
Stated differently, we
are approaching the need for another planet earth to support our lifestyles and
consumption patterns.
Quietly in November 2022
we blasted past 8 billion world population. Estimates are that we will max out between
9 and 11 billion world population. But, as the rest of the world consumes at
the rate of the industrialized world, we need 4 to 6 worlds to support us all.
It is not that the earth cannot support us all; it simply can’t support us in
the same lifestyle we would like, using the same production methods.
You might find critics of
the analysis on Earth Carrying Capacity and Earth Overshoot Day. But the
concept holds up rather well. There’s sustainable, and there’s non-sustainable.
If our 8 billion population and all businesses move toward being 100 percent
sustainable, then Earth Overshoot Day will return to the black, all year, every
year. And, if we like the planet we’ve got very much at all, moving to all
sustainable is better much sooner, not later.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Shopping & Giving Week.
Think Sustainable. Be
Sustainable.
Elmer Hall (c) SBP
First Published on IntellZine.com (modified and reprinted here with permission
of Author).
Check out Hall & Hinkelman’s
book on Nonprofit Planning and Impactful Giving for more on fundraising and
philanthropic ecosystems.
Hall,
E. B. & Hinkelman, R. M. (2022). Perpetual
Innovation™: Strategic planning for nonprofits and the art of impactful giving:
the gift of giving, the art of caring. ISBN: 979-8842614615
Retrieved from: Amazon.com/dp/B0BF8MB13X (Available
on Kindle eBook as well.)
