Going into this activity, I wasn’t even slightly worried that my footprint might be large. I don’t eat meat, and I take public transportation regularly. I really try to be conscious of my energy use. These things made me feel like an environmentalist extraordinaire. I was wrong.
According to this calculator, to sustain my lifestyle worldwide we’d need 4.6 Earths. Granted this is below the American average, it’s still not good – especially in light of what I thought it was. In terms of acreage, my lifestyle takes up 20.5 of global acres, compared to the average of 17. So in this regard, my footprint is actually worse than that of the average American. Most of the acreage is used by energy land. To me, the fact that my acreage is more than the average American is even more disturbing than the amount of Earths it takes to sustain my lifestyle. This is really eye-opening.
My ecological footprint consisted primarily of services. I’m not entirely sure what this means exactly, but I’m positive that there are many changes I could make in my life to shrink my footprint. I could start eating more locally grown produce, and preparing more of my own food – which, as a college kid, I’m not the best at. I could also cut down on my use of electricity and my consumption of new gadgets, which take a lot of resources to make, and a lot of land to produce. I could encourage my family and friends to do the same, so that our household and others live more sustainably.
According to my graph, eating large quantities of meat has the greatest effect on ecological footprint. It follows that if everyone around the world were to switch to a vegetarian diet, it would be conducive to creating a much more sustainable society. In conjunction with using mass transit more and using energy sparingly, this could create a more sustainable world. Of course, these individual choices are important, and mass awareness is key – but to change the course of the world definitively, more must be done. Industry is the cause of a large amount of the environmental issues we are seeing today; we either change this system, or resign ourselves indefinitely to environmental degradation. This is something we all need to come to terms with, and commit to taking action against.
