Ecological Footprint Part 2: What's Yours?
If you want to find out your ecological footprint, go to www.myfootprint.org and follow the quiz.
Mine comes out as:
1.5ha Food
0.7ha Mobility
1.5ha Shelter
1.2ha Goods & Services
Giving me a grand total of 4.9ha compared to a national average of 5.3ha using this method. OK but not brilliant. The biggest change I could make is to go vegan which would lop a whole hectare off. BTW I like to think my food rating is really lower as I buy local produce from local stores which isn't picked up in this particular model.
My 'shelter' footprint will go down when our first child arrives next Jan meaning our domestic requirements will be shared by 3 rather than 2. Erm, isn't population growth an environmental problem, rather than an environmental solution?
PS: off on holiday for a week - see you soon!
posted by Gareth Kane @ 11:52 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
HI,
good to see someone blogging on trying to do the right thing by the planet. I am not as far down the path as you but am trying to buy local and buy happy meat and so on. At the moment I'm particularly interested in green nappies as am having my first baby in January - has anyone got any experience of these? (I mean real nappies rather than biodegradable ones), I was a bit worried about the recent LCA suggesting there's not much difference between real and disposable.....
I was going to cover the nappies Life Cycle Assessment on a later post... watch this space!
Hi Gareth,
Nice initiative! You have me puzzled a bit already. I haven't heard anybody advocate population growth as a way of saving the planet. Unless of course our children do things smarter than we; and I guess they'll have to. So maybe, in a roundabout sort of way?
David
David,
My point exactly - population growth increases environmental pressures, so we have to be very careful when calculating footprints per person.
The same thing happens with car passengers. We assume that two-in-a-car is a good thing, but the second person may not need to make the journey and will require extra energy to move around!
Gareth
Thanks for the link to the footprint calculator - I'm a sucker for those!
My results seemed pretty good:
FOOD 0.7
MOBILITY 0.1
SHELTER 1.1
GOODS/SERVICES 0.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 2.6
But we still need more than one planet to keep us going, even at that rate.......
Where did people find out how many people live in their town / village? I just guessed mine, but I'm not sure I got it right.
Great blog - thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us :)
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