1. My carbon footprint is 23.8 tons of carbon dioxide and this requires 22.4 global acres to sustain. This would be about five planets worth of land if everyone on earth lived the way I did.

2. This is a graph comparing my global footprint to the national average to the footprint obtained when three factors were maximized.

Discussion Continued:

1. My footprint is slightly higher than that of the national average if we compare based on acreage, but is the same if we estimate based on planetary land needed.

2. Since I depend on public transportation to get to school everyday, I don’t think this is something I can change for now. However, I do eat meat on a daily basis and if I could, I would try to eat less animal derivatives overall. This should decrease my footprint by about one to two average earths if everyone else lived the way I did.
3. As we have discussed in class, there is no one perfect solution to making the world more sustainable. There is always a challenge to determining what resource is “more worth” saving. However, I think that getting larger institutions to adopt some characteristically individual-based approaches to sustainability would be a good start. For instance, my family recycles, but it would be great if larger organizations like schools, supermarkets, office buildings, and hospitals, for instance, started recycling more regularly. I think it would also be good to encourage people to eat fewer foods that contain animal derivatives. These are practices that are usually held responsible by individuals, but if larger policy and institutions made more of an effort to promote these practices, I think we would be making a lot more progress towards living sustainably.