Ecological Footprint

Recently I've been researching ways to reduce my ecological footprint. My obsession began as I read Jim Merkel's excellent book Radical Simplicity. If you have never heard the term Ecological Footprint, wikipedia defines it as,

"the amount of land and area a human population would hypothetically need to provide the resources required to support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology."

One of the reasons environmentalists calculate Ecological Footprint is to demonstrate concretely the disparity of world incomes. By dividing the amount of arable land in the world by the population, they have discovered that we each have about 4.7 acres to provide all of our needs. Of course this amount of acreage assumes that humans use all of the arable land and wildlife gets none. (The book discusses the philosophy of this issue, what percent of the world should be for humans what percent for plant and animal diversity.) They then went on to calculate that the average footprint of Americans was 24 acres. More than six times the world average! This means of course we would need 6 planets if the entire world consumed at the rate of Americans.

Radical Simplicity allows you to ask: how much land does it take to feed, clothe, transport and house myself? Also add in to that figure land for goods and services and you have your ecological footprint.

Housing includes the building materials for your house or apartment, plus your yard, also the land used to heat your living space and the land required to sop up the carbon created by burning fossil fuels to provide you heat and electricity. Food includes the land to grow food, plus land to generate fuel for tractors and trucks to haul food to the store, also land to produce pesticides and fertilizers. Goods include your stereo, computer, couch, refrigerator as well as bike or other vehicles. Transportation is the land for fuels used to transport you around (also airplane trips.) Services is education, medical expenses, lawyer fees, etc. That last one is kind of difficult to quantify ... actually all of them are kind of tricky.

You can do a quick estimate of your footprint at www.myfootprint.org. Once you have calculated your footprint you can start coming up with creative ways to reduce it.

The one problem I've had with the book however has been the author's austere plans in the appendix, actually just the smallest plan. He has 3 plans that take 6 acres, 3 acres and 1 acre respectively. The scary one is the 1 acre plan which trades off preventative medical care, heat for the house and cuts electricity usage to equal to that of 5 hours a day of a compact-flourescent light bulb. (?!) When I first read that plan, it was so shocking it almost put me off from the whole project. I guess the 1 acre plan is good for perspective, but it may do more damage to morale by including it than good.

Of course on the other hand he says, let's cut back American consumption slowly over a hundred years, to the average world consumption level.