Whenever there is a severe weather threat in any community, it’s no surprise when you see people on the news flocking to stores to buy a weeks worth of toilet paper, water bottles, and milk. The fear of being stuck in their homes and running out of these things becomes so critical that sometimes stores will run out of these products. In this case, that is what we call an overshoot in a stores’ stock of supplies. There were so many people needing the products but the store was unable to meet the demand and ran out. This is a simple example of the term overshoot, but there is one term that has become a very serious issue in the past few decades: Ecological overshoot. The word overshoot can be defined as going past something. That something being a point, a target, or a limit. You may hear the word overshoot in terms of sports, where someone overshoots the ball reaching the goal. In financial terms, someone can overshoot their cash limit. When flying, you can overshoot the landing strip. Ecological overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the longterm carrying capacity of its environment. Another way to define ecological overshoot can be said by stating that the increase in the Earth’s productivity is not enough to compensate for the demands of this growing population. Our worlds population has grown at an astounding rate, so with a growing population comes a growing demand for resources. Water is an obvious basic element we need to survive, but the earth is slowly decreasing in our fresh water resources because we are consuming much more than we should to keep the balance. Studies have shown us in different ecosystems that over population of a certain species such as deer can bring a depletion of food supply and result in extinction in that area. In researching these observations, it is possible that this could happen to our human race. Many things would