You objected 'It's only "extraordinary" if you assume that a population is incapable of (temporarily) exceeding its own carrying capacity, which would be erroneous.'
But what does 'carrying capacity' mean? Willam Allan, who coined the phrase said 'to every area of land there is a population limit. This limit may be termed the critical population or carrying capacity.' (Studies in African Land Usage in Northern Rhodesia, 1949)
If carrying capacity is the limit that an area of land can support then you cannot exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, without starvation. You qualify 'temporarily' but the truth is that every year that the global footprint has been calculated, it has been larger than the actual area harvested. And not just a bit larger, for a little while, a lot larger, as long as they have been measuring it. It just does not make sense.
I think that the actual reason is the following:
the measuring of resource use in hectares is a representational device that the glocal footprint network has adopted, which no longer has any direct relationship to the actual land area from which we get our resources.
I think that what the global network does is to estimate what it thinks are the sustainable resources of each crop or mineral, make an aggregate total, and then represent that as the available land area, so that it then can say that our resource use corresponds to so many hectares sized global footprint.
In other words, it is a crap methodology, that is full of holes.