Take a walk in my Footprint

How much land does it take to support your lifestyle? Working on a class project this week I was asked to calculate my ecological footprint using the website Footprintnetwork.org. An ecological footprint measures the amount of resources required to support your lifestyle choices going through various parts of your life from how much you drive to what type of house you live in and how you eat.

I calculated my footprint last year and came out slightly higher then this year which is comforting considering I have tightened up some of my consumer behaviours during this challenge. A lot of that is made up of where and how I live. I live in a detached home, use electricity on the grid and shower... up to several times a week. Even though I do make choices about my consumer habits that help my footprint become smaller, certain things like how green my house is will be mostly out of my control during my student years until I can have an income that affords me the luxury of choosing my dwelling and amenities. It is reassuring to see at least that my smaller impact are in the areas I have been focusing of goods and food (whew). The diagnosis of 4.4 global hectares means that after all the work I put into living locally I still live relatively unsustainably. Finding new ways to decrease that number will be an ongoing challenge, hopefully for all of us.

The assessment included some tips to reduce my footprint including the recommendation that I eat more local produce, take public transit, turn down my thermostat and purchase more locally. Already doing all of these things begs me to question how thorough the results can be for those of us who already pay particular attention to these things and make concerted effort to reduce our impact. It also makes it harder to understand what more we can do to reduce our impact if we have already exhausted the recommendations of the "professionals".  At the end of the day it is a little discouraging to see that is would still require 2.5 planets to live the way I do. But I think the real question is; what realistically can we do when we live apart of a system that will only allow us to be as sustainable as the system itself?

Happy Monday,

Melanie

"Live simply that others might simply live." - Ghandi