What is an ecological footprint and how can I lower it?

A spokesperson for www.allspecies.org, Marty Craft runs over the basics for America’s ecological footprint.

“Environmental problems are often very difficult to see,” said Craft.  “They are even more difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. The Ecological Footprint is a tool that can help us see a little more clearly our effect on our planet.

“Here I focus on my own neighborhood to bring environmental awareness home to where we live. It was delivered with the neighborhood’s newsletter. Other neighborhoods or cities are invited to use this article as an educational model for newsletters in their own communities.”

Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees have written a book, “Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on Earth” that puts carrying capacity back on center stage of the international development debate.

“Using Rees’ “ecological footprint” concept and figures from Wackernagel’s web site, Ecological Footprints of Nationsthis article shows just how much of the Earth’s land and water area it take to support each person in the 49/63 Neighborhood,” said Craft.

Craft gives us an idea of what ecological footprint means:

Sustainability -Central to their work is the concept of sustainability – “living in material comfort and peacefully with each other within the means of nature.” Implied in living within the means of nature is that we of the present time don’t ruin nature’s balance and bounty for our children. Sustainability also implies that we live on renewable resources not on fossil fuels that will run out in the foreseeable future.

An Ecological Footprint -An ecological footprint includes the land used to supply all our energy needs, the land used by all the roads, buildings, parking lots, etc. that we depend on, the land used to grow our food, the forest land providing us with wood and paper and the land necessary to dispose of our waste. Drawing from readily available statistics, Our Ecological Footprint attempts to show how much land area our life style requires now and also how much land area we would use if we lived sustainably. Since the statistics used are collected from the whole country the footprint we see turns out to be an average American’s footprint. Each person would then have to evaluate the various factors in their own lives and adjust up or down from the average.

According to the Footprints of Nationsthe ecological foot print of one average American is 10.3 hectares or 25.45 acres. That is five city blocks plus about two lots (using 5 acre blocks divided into 24 lots). That is how much land it takes to supply all the energy, food, paper, building materials, and consumer goods to keep one average person living the life to which he or she has grown accustomed. By contrast the ecological footprint of average world citizen is 2.8 hectares or 6.92 acres. That is one city block plus about three lots. In India the average person uses about 1.98 acres. That means that about nine city lots supplies all that the average Indian survives on.

If everyone on our planet used as many resources and created as much waste as the Average American, we would require four and two thirds Earths to sustain us.