We live in a world that's defined by limits. A person can only live so long; a pitcher can only throw the ball so hard; a college student can only drink so much.

There are planetary limits too—which is precisely why we have a sustainability problem. If you put deer on an island (a small planet, as it were), they'll do fine until there are more deer than there is food to sustain them. At this point overshoot is reached, and in due course the system crashes. This is a gentle way of saying that the deer die off and the environment gets to regenerate.

The human population is now in planetary overshoot. The signs are everywhere as fisheries collapse, rainforests shrink, and so on. Yet overshoot is not only demographic, not only a function of too many people consuming too much. It also has an internal dimension. Not only are we living beyond our means as a species, we are also doing so as individuals, and in part this is because we have a wrongheaded, or perhaps the better word is "overshot," notion of what we're entitled to. We want things we can't really afford, whether it's our own house or his-and-hers cars. The American dream has taught us we can have it all; a spiritually challenged variation on the theme tells us we can have it all now; and the result is a pervasive cultural perception that financial overshoot is not just okay, it's right and proper and indeed the American Way.

In short, the financial crisis has an ecological dimension. We are in financial overshoot, and the reason we're in financial overshoot is because, with apologies to Billy Joel, we've got An Overshoot State of Mind.

Who's to blame? Since the global financial crisis broke, commentators on the right have tended to blame all those greedy poor people whose reach exceeded their grasp. That's a cheap and easy out, and in fact there's a word for it: scapegoating. At the end of the day, the blame lies elsewhere. Predatory mortgage lenders, greedy credit card companies, a broken health care system, runaway college tuition, and, yes, a certain soon-to-be ex-president who invited us to display our patriotism by shopping: these are just a few of the many culprits. And yes, many of us should have known better, only … our friends were doing it … and the whole country was doing it … and there was a massive Times Square ticker scrolling across the vast brow of the nation, from sea to shining sea, which read: Financial Overshoot Is Okay. Just Do It!

Hey: it can't be wrong, or even dumb, if everybody's doing it.

Only ... there are these laws about limits.

Welcome to System Crash Central.

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There's good news to be found in this mess.

Like it or not, our unsustainable habits will have to change. It's not like we have a choice about it: we'll have to start living within our means.

The adjustment will be wrenching, and to many it will feel cataclysmic. And no wonder: it's never easy to let go of a dream. We're going to have to learn to make do with less, and to be happy with less.

We're going to have to start finding happiness in things that you can't get by going into debt, like community and caring. We'll have to go back to basics and get in touch with some deep and basic truths. Like, love and gratitude are free.

I don't know about you, but this feels good to me. It feels like an opportunity.

And inevitable, too ... part of a grand ecological pattern: after overshoot, renewal.