Something to do this weekend
Share your Thoughts
Posted on October 28, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Okay, after today’s earlier post, here is something fun 
to do this weekend — take your ecological footprint quiz. You can do this by clicking here. It is brought to you by the Earth Day Network. I found it by way of the Global Footprint Network, which also looks like an interesting resource.
I just took mine. The good news: in terms of the ‘biologically productive’ acres required to support my lifestyle, I came out well below the average in my local area — 20 as compared to 24.
The bad news: it would require 4.6 planets for everyone to live as I do.
To sustain the current population, 4.5 biologically productive acres is the per capita limit – that’s all. That’s what exists. That’s what the Earth has available for us, even as population is still growing.
Now here’s the thing — we could live on that amount, but it means radically reorganizing the way the world works, and changing priorities profoundly — not just economic, social amd political priorities, but spiritual ones, moral ones — values, meaning, the reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The thing about this test for me personally is that I live pretty simply, pretty low on the consumption scale. The quiz does not take into account things like shopping at the mall and the clothes we buy and the computers and iPods and on and on, which would add enormously to the footprint. I drive a car that gets 40 mpg on the open road, 36 or so in the city. I drive as little as possible. I have not been on an airplane in over a year.
But I look around and realize how little is available to me in the infrastructure of my life to reduce my own impact much more, things like availability of mass transit, affordable mass-produced hybrids or true electric cars, year-round locally produced food (all the farms in my county have disappeared since I moved here, victim of suburban and exurban development), affordable transitions to solar and wind power, to name just a few.
This is why the work to save life on the planet is not just a personal work. It is a political, social, and economic work as well. To get to those levels, we have to get committed and organized. There are many groups to join, there are elections in just a week, and again in 2008.
We must live within the means of our precious Earth, or… Consider that ‘or,’ and then let’s see if we are prepared to do what we need to do.
Comments
Leave a Reply
