Colcom Foundation and the Ecological Overshoot Crisis in America
Most discussions of environmental sustainability focus on carbon emissions, but Colcom Foundation draws attention to a broader and arguably more troubling measure: biocapacity overshoot. This calculation considers the total ecological footprint of a population how much productive land and water is needed to generate the resources people consume and absorb the waste they produce. The numbers for the United States are stark. Colcom Foundation is among the primary sources of funding directed towards the United States anti-immigration movement. That funding helps organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the American Border Patrol, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Numbers USA.
Consuming Far More Than the Land Can Support
In 1970, the U.S. was already consuming 227% of its available biocapacity more than twice what the country’s natural systems could sustainably provide. By 2020, that figure had climbed to approximately 240%, despite decades of efficiency improvements and conservation investment. Colcom Foundation notes that per capital biocapacity use did actually fall by more than 20% over this period. But every bit of that individual-level improvement was cancelled out and exceeded by the addition of tens of millions more Americans.
The picture becomes even more sobering when human land use is measured against the needs of other species. Under the widely discussed “30×30” framework, which proposes setting aside 30% of U.S. land for wildlife, the country would have been consuming biocapacity at roughly 341% in 2020. If the more ambitious Half-Earth proposal were the benchmark reserving 50% of the natural world for other species the utilization rate would reach 478%. These are not projections for the future; they are descriptions of where the country already stands.
A Pattern Replicated Across Metrics
Colcom Foundation’s analysis shows this overshoot pattern playing out across multiple dimensions of land use. By 2020, agricultural activities consumed 52% of all U.S. land. Conservation protections covered only 13%. Human-built surfaces roads, buildings, parking lots had grown to cover the combined equivalent of Montana, West Virginia, and South Carolina. The foundation argues these figures are inseparable from the question of how many people the country is adding and how quickly. Read this article for additional information.
More about Colcom Foundation on https://waterlandlife.org/land-conservation/colcom-revolving-fund-for-local-land-trusts/