What's Your Ecological Footprint?

In This Article:
- Accelerating trends in population growth and energy demand create a small planet
- Game up your footprint     

   

Want to know your ecological footprint?  -  Then Click here. Even though I, bike to work every day, buy local food and refrain from meat, it requires about 4 earths if everyone would live like me - so there is lot's of room for improvement.  

The link above connects to the organization "Footprint Network" which created a neat online tool/game to estimate how many worlds it would need, if every human on the planet would like you. Take a look, it is actually quite entertaining and well made. 

Did you know that since WWII our population has more than doubled?! An risen more than 1000 times since the last ice age 20k years ago, which is just a second ago compare to how long life exists on planet earth. In addition, we are consuming about 10x the amount of energy than we used to just 100 years ago. Ever more and more people needing more and more every ... sounds like a runaway scenario, does it?

Seeing our planet shrink
  
Is this a problem? Most likely yes, because if we take more than what the environment supplies us with, we are depleting our natural assets over time. So, how come we don't see this? Firstly, the feedback time from the ecosystem 'earth' has a rather slow response time. Thus, if we mess up something now, it takes tens to hundreds of years to show it's effect. The down side is, once the snowball got into motion, it's had to stop. 

Secondly, there are plenty of indicators of abnormalities and trends, such as global rising temperatures leading to polar ice melting and hence rising ocean levels. Or try the atmospheric CO2 levels which jumped to record highs over the last 200 years (=> industrial revolution!). 

The solution?

Consume less, invent new materials and technologies to reduce our footprint, help with policy regulatories and most importantly use your brain! Yes, just simply think about the effects of your doing, such as the 2nd order effects I highlighted in my article below. Ask yourself: 

• Do I really need to do this trip to get ... say a bag of milk which I need to bake the cake?
• Could I do without the cake? If not, could I borrow just a bit of milk from my neighbor (=> yes, train those rusty social skills a bit)?
• Could I get the milk tomorrow, instead of today? 
• Could I even carpool with someone? (=> watch out, you might have a good conversation while doing it ;-))
• Do I need to go by car at all? Could I maybe take my old bike? (=> which would get me even in better shape and would reduce my long-term medical bill) 

What seems like common sense, gets oftentimes thrown overboard when we only see our goal and the immediate actions in getting there. Ever head the term "tunnel vision"...?! :-)