If you were to visit my office, you’d see under my transparent desk blotter a small piece of paper with five green dots on it. The dots, on close inspection, are actually Planet Earths. Five is the number of Planet Earths it would take if everyone in every country were to live the lifestyle I lead.
Obviously, we don’t have five Planet Earths. Nope, just the one. And this is the central dilemma taken on by my friends Susan Burns and Mathis Wackernagel of the Global Footprint Network. For about five years now, they’ve been comparing how much of nature’s resources people use with how much the earth can supply. The story is not a happy one. There is now so much human demand for nature’s products and services that each year, we use up what nature supplies by around September, and spend the rest of the year in “overshoot.” This has been happening since the mid-1980’s.
My friends came from Oakland for an unexpected visit last weekend so that they could attend a “soirée” organized on their behalf at a home in the Hollywood Hills. About thirty or forty people, many in the entertainment business and many entrepreneurs, took in the dramatic view and listened while Mathis spoke about his sense of mission and purpose in accounting for human demands on nature, and Susan described how people can learn more and do more to help.
Here’s how Mathis put the problem in an e-mail:
“We currently have only one planet that supports life. The surface of our planet Earth is about 125 billion acres. But since some is ice, desert and deep ocean, only about one quarter of it is productive (fishing grounds, forests, grazing land, crop land etc.). With a world population of about 6.7 billion, this gives us roughly 5 acres per person. That’s the budget. Right now, it takes about 24 acres to support an average American.”
Those who read my blog may know that I’m not quite the average American, in that I have this thing about using transit. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen (and some who politely try not to) my list of reasons for riding the bus as often as I can. I also try to eat meat less often than I used to. So my ecological footprint is a little closer to 21 acres than 24.
With all the current focus on climate change and carbon emissions, I’ll take a minute to note that an ecological footprint isn’t the same thing as a carbon footprint. Carbon is part of the picture, but the ecological footprint also considers the acreage it takes to provide the energy, plant and animal products we use and to accept the wastes we generate. (Carbon is part of that “waste stream.”)
Part of the reason my footprint isn’t smaller is my house. It’s a very typical Long Beach house: one story, three bedrooms, two baths, detached garage, central heat and air, built partly in the 1940’s and partly in the 1980’s. It’s sunny and comfortable and I love living there every single day. But it could be better insulated (in a number of expensive ways) and truly, do the two of us (plus cat) really need all that space? Nonetheless, I can’t picture giving it up for something with a smaller environmental impact, so for now I accept that I’m living a more or less “average” American lifestyle, mitigated by a few bus trips and some recycling.
If you’d like to estimate your ecological footprint, it’s easy, and interesting. Here’s a link to the Global Footprint Network’s footprint calculator. You can do the quick, approximate version, which might take you four minutes, or the longer, more detailed version, which might take you eight to ten. Susan and Mathis are working with many national governments to estimate and address their entire countries’ footprints, and are in the process of identifying ecological debtor nations (those with a deficit) and ecological creditors (those with a reserve) – an intriguing if somewhat worrisome concept. I leave it to you to guess which kind the U.S. is.
I think it might be illuminating to investigate the collective footprint of the residents of Long Beach. When you hold up a mirror, sometimes you see something you want to change. Here are some thoughts on footprint analysis for cities; there’s plenty more interesting content on the Global Footprint Network web site, and I hope you take a few minutes to visit.