Have you ever wondered what your ecological footprint is? I know I have. I live my life in what I would consider to be a reasonably sustainable way, am a student of the environmental sciences, hope to dedicate my life to developing solutions to the global warming crisis, but have never actually assessed my footprint on the earth.
In order to calculate my ecological footprint, I used the http://www.myfootprint.org/ calculator. The settings I chose were for Calgary (the only option for a Canadian city), detailed, and adult. My result was 5, which means that I require 5 global hectares of land to support my lifestyle. If everyone lived my lifestyle, we would need 2.8 planets to sustain us! This is absolutely appalling! I knew that living in a western nation came with a higher footprint, but I didn’t realize it was this large.
However, there were a few things which I think skewed my result. First of all, I carpool to school every day. The transportation section did not have a way to take this into account, it merely asked how often you drove alone. The calculator is also set up for Calgary, which has one of the highest ecological footprints of any Canadian city. I think that if Victoria, or even BC were options, that my overall footprint would be decreased. In addition, the calculator does not let you choose zero on several things, like how much you spend on natural gas per month. The lowest amount is $35.00, but I don’t use any natural gas, so it gets included in my footprint, even though I don’t use any. It also does this for the amount spent per month on non-food consumables, such as clothing, books, and technology. Since I very rarely buy these things, the calculator adds to my footprint the manufacturing of things that I am not consuming. Another factor to consider is that my city is located on an island. Most of our food is transported from the mainland, so it adds an extra negative ecological impact to most of our food. The calculator is also set for a national level services footprint. This means that if certain provinces or cities are bad environmental offenders in the services area, every Canadian is stuck with a higher services footprint, and thus a higher overall footprint. The Canadian average is 5.8 global hectares per person, and the Calgary average is 8.6! In comparison to these averages, I am having a smaller global impact than many Canadians; however, if large polluters such as Alberta and Saskatchewan were not included in the Canadian average footprint, I wonder how much lower mine would be from the national average.
So what are the implications of my global footprint? Well first of all, we don’t have 2.8 planets to live on, so my lifestyle is obviously not even close to sustainable! This is especially disturbing when you take into account that I live more sustainably than many Canadians. For instance, I recycle everything I can, I drive a Smart car, I carpool to school, I eat meat only a few times a week, and try to buy all of my fruit and vegetable produce locally. I live in a smallish house with four other people. I am in a province that produces primarily hydroelectric power, so a large portion of my electricity is from a renewable energy source. I take short showers and only wash laundry once a week. All of these things could be considered fairly sustainable, but yet I still need 5 hectares of land!
The frustrating part of this exercise was that I tried testing out the differences between my current lifestyle and a drastically different lifestyle, and the results were pretty similar. Right now I live in a freestanding house with three other people, collectively the household uses a fair amount of electricity. I share a Smart car with my husband and eat an omnivorous diet. If I became a vegetarian, lived in an apartment building, drastically reduced my electricity consumption, and got rid of my car, I would reduce my footprint to 4.1 global hectares. That is still high enough to need 2.3 planets to sustain a world full of people living like me.
This demonstrates the complex nature of the global warming crisis. It is one thing to convince people to reduce their overall consumption, to get them to bike more, carpool more, recycle and use energy efficient appliances, but is this actually enough to create a sustainable world? The answer, it seems, is no. Unfortunately, I don't know what the solution is to this problem. Perhaps, by changing the way that we generate energy (through renewable sources), by changing the way the we obtain our food (locally and minimally processed), by changing the way that we travel (electric cars or other green technology, bicycling, and walking) we can change our overall global impact more effectively.
As a final note, I tried footprint calculators from other sources, such as the WWF’s Eco Guru and got similar results. For example, the amount of planets we would need if everyone had my lifestyle was 2.4 for the Eco Guru calculator.
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