Measuring Your Ecological
Footprint
Each student keeps a record of
their use of natural resources for two months (or more). It is very important that you do
the recording carefully and completely. Your textbook discusses the topic and assumptions,
so keep it close at hand as you estimate your footprint. There are also "notes"
on the spreadsheet that add specific details about the calculations. We will discuss these
features, and they will help you devise ways of doing this for other people,
organizations, and cities. You will be expected to analyze your footprint, discuss what
aspects you can reduce by simple changes in your activities and daily choices, and which
are essentially forced upon you by the infrastructure of our society. Thus, using your
holistic goal you will be able to improve your choices and begin to reform your social
infrastructure. With the appropriate infrastructure it becomes easier for you and others
to shift resource uses and needs.
Estimating more than one month's
footprint allows you to associate different activities between the months with the changes
in your footprint. Pay attention to the kinds of habitats (energy land, pasture, forest,
sea, built-up land) that is affected. Also, note which activities or features of your life
(food, housing, transportation, etc.) contribute most to your footprint. These
are particular ways that a different lifestyle, or a different set of options to live a
certain way, would have the greatest effect in reducing your footprint. This information
gives you an important way to monitor your ecological effects with respect to your
holistic goal. Information, then knowledge allows good decisions to be made.
If you are to manage natural resources
as a profession, one of the important criteria you need to consider when you make
decisions is the amount of dependence the alternative actions force upon your client. To
make your client dependent upon a nonrenewable resource would likely create unnecessary and unacceptable risk for the future. You
need to find the information that allows you to project how soon the risks you create
would become acute, which possibly would force your client into financial jeopardy, and
unnecessarily destroy essential resources. On a global scale, check the one showing the estimated
footprints of
countries, especially noting how many have appropriated more resources than they have.
Each of these examples are ecologically unjust, regardless of the economic picture they
paint. No system can be called "sustainable" without ecological justice.
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