Heel to Toe

Calculating my ecofootprint at www.footprintnetwork.org was kind of fun, and interesting too. Instead of doing the more general bar, I tried to be as specific as possible to make my results more accurate. Apparently, with the way I lead my life, it would take 4.4 planet earths’ to support my lifestyle. I find this a little hard to believe. I mean, I just don’t think that it would be that much. Because I am only one single person, on this planet of 4.6 billion and I know there are people out there with lifestyles more lavish than mine, so I am under the impression that if this were true, and other people are worse than me, then planet earth that we know and love, might have imploded already.

But that is just my reasoning and I am well aware that others probably disagree with me. Even so, I played around on the website a little bit and got familiar with it. I selected the “explore scenarios” button and I saw a few different choices that gave me the opportunity to reduce my personal ecofootprint. I thought they were a little bit too big of first steps to take! And I was trying to be as reasonable as possible, and only ended up selecting one choice. That once choice was to be a fully committed buyer of earth friendly packaging when I buy my products, ranging from recyclable to fully biodegradable.

This one check mark brought me from 4.4 earths down to 4.1 earths to sustain my lifestyle. Not too big of an improvement, but it’s something I suppose. The final question that this weeks prompt for the blog asks, is if the whole world population lived like me, then what is the maximum population that the world could hold…in accordance with this “ecofootprint” calculator. I could not find anything on this calculator, let alone the website, that gave me such an answer to this question. But since one earth cannot (hypothetically) support me, I don’t’ think if everyone else lived like me, that the world could hold them at all.

The term “ecofootprint” got me thinking. And I started to wonder the difference between that and a carbon footprint. I looked it up and here is what I came up with. The Ecological Footprint (or as I cal it here, ecofootprint) has emerged as the world’s premier measure of humanity’s demand on nature. It measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resource it consumes and to absorb its carbon dioxide emissions, using prevailing technology. A bit differently, a carbon footprint is a measure of the impact our activities have on the environment, and in particular climate change. It relates to the amount of greenhouse gases produced in our day-to-day lives through burning fossil fuels for electricity, heating and transportation etc.

This breaks down even further into the primary footprint and the secondary footprint. The primary footprint is a measure of our direct emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels including domestic energy consumption and transportation (e.g. car and plane). We have direct control of these. The secondary footprint is a measure of the indirect CO2 emissions from the whole lifecycle of products we use - those associated with their manufacture and eventual breakdown. To put it very simply – the more we buy the more emissions will be caused on our behalf.