Ecological Footprint

Posted by Justin under World

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This is a very well-made Flash site that gives you a short quiz to calculate how much of the earth’s resources you use. My results:

Wow. 2.8 Earths. That’s heavy.

It converts the units depending on your country, so make sure you convert if you’re comparing. Google will do it for you:
13 acres to hectares = 5.26… hectares

Via Coop.

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3 Responses to “Ecological Footprint”

Well, I use 18, but I’ve got two kids, and I’m still way below the national average. What’s everone else doing?

My philosophical problem with this is that it assumes that the ONLY solution is to conserve. Perhaps I could drive a scooter to work.

The other alternative is to INCREASE the number of biologically productive acres per person.

It would be interesting to know how many biologically productive acres per person there are in the United States. I’ll be there’s a lot. I wonder what the population of the US divided by the productive acres in the US would be? Fly across the country and once you get over the Cascades you see lots of green squares on the ground almost all the way to the Atlantic. Am I using the productive acres of other countries, and if so, how much?

Also, was this 4.5 acres statistic calculated before or after Mugabe destroyed the “biological productivity” of most all the acres of farmland in Zimbabwe?

Posted by Richard |

Here’s another perspective on the stats used in this quiz:

Anyone who follows this blog knows that my wife and I are using sustainable permaculture methods to run our small, organic farm. My wife and I both firmly believe that too many Christians ignore our environmental responsibilities–we need to live on less and take better care of our resources. You’ve read that here many times, too.

So we have some familiarity with the green movement and the figures it uses to whip up hysteria. The latest viral meme to hit some Christian Web sites (those that tend to lean more left than right) takes the form of this link to My Footprint.

Unfortunately, I know that the figures behind this quiz are highly questionable. Sustainability has been long questioned because the basis often used by green advocates is ridiculously low. Paul Ehrlich, a widely admired green advocate, “prophesied” that the Earth would be ravaged by the time we hit the 1990s. We know that this was patently false, yet green advocates continue to use Ehrlich’s ridiculous assertions and statistics in their message.

Read the rest here.

Posted by thx |

There probably is some exaggeration, though I find it hard to believe that my personal level of consumption is any less than triple the world average.

Most people are totally unaware of this disproportionate situation. While I don’t think it’s downright evil or needs to be cut to a 1.0 level immediately, it’s at least worth thinking about.

Posted by Justin |

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