6.26.2006

Eco-Footprint Madness

According to the University of British Columbia, my eco-footprint is 4.98 hectares, which is 48.85% of the average North American's footprint. For all humans to live the same lifestyle would require 3.38 earths, setting aside 33% of the biosphere for other species.

Some would argue that I should sacrifice more in order to cut down the impact of my lifestyle. I disagree. Great improvements are possible without sacrifice if we as a society adopt some relatively painless change.

For example, though I don't own a car, I do rent one at least a couple times a year, usually for long trips such as skiing or other travel. If those cars were manufactured to be recyclable, and ran with minimal use of fossil fuels, their impact would be mitigated. Similarly, I currently rent an apartment, and so only have minimal opportunity to make changes to the lighting fixtures and appliances, which are currently not particularly efficient - this is the landlord's choice. With regard to food, I would buy many more organic groceries if they were more widely available, and would be more likely to buy local, in-season produce were there some indication as to the source of produce at the grocery store. Finally, while renewable energy technologies are available, it is not possible for me to choose to use renewable energy where I currently live.

On another topic, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with the new fad of taking the current world population (or even future projections) and saying "this is how many earths we'd need to support our current population the way you live, you fat pig". As I've already outlined above, great progress could be made, even to my 50%-better-than-average lifestyle, through simple, straightforward changes that are beyond my personal control, but well within the grasp of society in general. But even if those changes only cut my current impact in half, we'd still apparently need at least 1.7 earths (and granted that any survey of 13 questions is overly simplistic, let's say we'd really need 2.5). What does that say to me? We need less people on this planet, by a factor of 2.5. At a current population of 6.5 billion people, maybe instead of 2.5 earths we need 6.5/2.5=2.6 billion people. Then let technology and better urban planning increase the standard of living beyond that point.

1 Comments:

Blogger Katy said...

you're right. there are ways to minimize our impact without having to feel like we're making some huge sacrifice. but i guess the problem is demand. as long as we refuse to make changes because, say, they're expensive, the demand will never be there to bring those things into the mainstream (i.e. organic food). or maybe i'm just tired?

i was reading a david suzuki book recently and he wrote that despite the fact that places like india and china have such huge populations, canada, the us and england together use up 80% of the world's resouces. sort of sad, really.

11:59 p.m.  

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