Advertise | About Us | My Account | Log In

 

Green

Earth Friend or Foe?

Measuring Your Ecological Footprint

    I like to think I’m a pretty good environmental citizen. I recycle almost everything I can. I eat organic foods. I’m an avid light turner-offer and heat turner-downer. My husband and I keep a compost heap in the backyard, into which we throw kitchen waste, pet bunny poop, garden scraps and hay. Then we actually use that compost to nourish the native plants, vegetables and bird-friendly bushes that we grow in our backyard.
    But I’m not perfect. During compulsive clutter-clearing sessions, I sometimes throw old batteries into the garbage; when our recycling bin overflows, I throw paper into the garbage bin, too. Our SUV is 15 years old (honestly, we bought it before SUVs were trendy). I rarely remember to bring my travel cup to coffee establishments (so I throw away several paper cups per week) and, on a really bad day, I indulge in a shower in the morning and a bath in the evening. Yes, that’s better than taking drugs to relax. But, I know, it’s a waste of water.
    So just how good a citizen am I really? To find out, I took an “ecological footprint” quiz (www.ecofoot.org) developed by the Earthday Network, an international organization that coordinates Earth Day events around the world. The quiz promised to help me estimate how much productive land and water I use to support my lifestyle.
    The idea of measuring one’s ecological footprint is not new. William Rees, a Canadian environmentalist and ecologist, first coined the term in 1992, after developing a way to measure the ecological costs of our rampant levels of consumption. The concept is gaining even more popularity now, as biologists struggle to find ways to both measure the damage we’re wreaking on the planet and come up with ways to slow the destruction. In fact, today footprinting is used to quantify the impact not only of individuals, but of neighborhoods, regions, countries, corporations, industry sectors and the entire human population.
    Since the late 1980s, the World Wildlife Fund reports, the world’s ecological footprint has been about 25 percent greater than the planet’s biological ability to sustain us; in the United States, we use more than 50 percent of our portion of the continent’s ability to sustain us. Such levels of “overshoot” can’t continue, ecologists warn, because it means we will deplete our ecosystems to the point where they will collapse, leading to the extinction of many valuable species.
    That’s where the ecological footprint can help, notes Brooking Gatewood, manager of communications and partnerships at the Global Footprint Network, a nonprofit consultancy along Oakland’s Embarcadero. “Knowing the footprint of an organization allows people to make better policy decisions,” she explains.
    In the last three years, GFN has worked with more than six dozen organizations, including the European Environment Agency and the World Wildlife Fund, and countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Wales, Australia and Canada. “Our goal is to end the ecological overshoot,” Gatewood says.
    A footprint is generally represented as the number of acres an entity requires to maintain its life (or corporate) style—and the measurements can be rather shocking, especially for Americans. Take my footprint, for instance. The total number of acres I need to support my lifestyle—13—is about half that of the average American (in part because I live in a small house, eat a lot of unprocessed foods and don’t drive a lot). Unfortunately, the globe only has 4.5 biologically productive acres available per person, worldwide. And if everyone lived like me, the quiz concluded, we’d need 2.9 planets. Ouch.
    Yet one of the most intriguing aspects of the Earthday quiz is that you can play around with all sorts of parameters to see how you can reduce your ecological footprint, ranging from using a bike or walking for transportation to reducing the amount of food grown farther than 200 miles away from your home. According to the quiz’s calculations, I could get my footprint down to about 6 acres just by increasing my clothesline use and bike riding (for transportation), as well as using still more unprocessed foods—all actions that I believe in, by the way, but get lazy about. That’s inspiring.
    Of course, footprinting is not an exact science. The Earthday quiz, for instance, didn’t measure the fact that I throw lots of food (e.g., the meat, bread and rotten leftovers that would attract rats to my backyard bin) into our green bin, to be composted at the Davis Street Transfer Center. Nor did it take into account the facts that I collect my dog’s poop in Very Expensive Biodegradable Poop Bags; I make lots of my own bread (have I used the words “earthy crunchy” yet?); and I buy most of my own—and my children’s—clothing at second-hand stores.
    But even a crude estimate is better than none—and that means that taking an ecological footprint is a good way to see just how much you contribute to the planet’s environmental problems—and how much you might be able to contribute to the solution.

---

Your Carbon Footprint

    Want to get even more specific about your ecological footprint? A number of Web sites now allow you to estimate your “carbon footprint”—or the amount of carbon dioxide that you contribute to the atmosphere each year, which is a pretty good measure of how your personal lifestyle impacts the urgent issue of global warming.
    As with the ecological footprint, carbon footprints can be used to measure the CO2 output of everything, from individuals to counties to countries, as well as companies and organizations. The average for an American is 7.5 tons per year. I’m happy to report that according to the calculator at www.climatecrisis.com, my own yearly average was 3.4 tons.
    I had a couple of saving graces on this one. First, although my big, old car only gets only 17 miles per gallon, I drive very little. In fact, because I work at home and walk my kids to school, I drive less than a quarter of the national average of 12,000 miles a year. Living in the Bay Area also keeps my heating bills low (and our house is heated by natural gas, not oil). Moreover, my local utility—Alameda Power & Telecom— gets upwards of 80 percent of its power from renewable sources.
    Still, even 3.4 seems like a lot, and I was relieved to see that this calculator, like the ecological footprint calculator, includes plenty of tips for getting my carbon emissions down, including turning the lights off, wrapping my hot water heater in a blanket, using locally grown foods (the average American meal travels 1,200 miles from farm to kitchen), biking more and eating less meat (cattle produce methane, a major greenhouse gas). By this time next year, I hope, I’ll have brought my carbon footprint down a whole shoe size.