Tina tagged me with a curious quiz created by EcoFoot.Org. The quiz informed me that it would take 3.2 planets to support the human race if everyone lived like I do. This troubled me. I was hoping for at least a one, if not a less than one. So, like any good scientist, I started messing with the criteria to see what would happen.
I morphed from a four person milk-egg-meat eating household, living in a 2,000 sf green design home with running water, a car, and 10 hours of airplane flight per year to a one person vegan household, living in an apartment with no running water, no car, and zero hours of airplane flight per year. My new footprint: 2.3 planets.
Hmmmmmm.
I played with all of the options and could not get a score of "1 planet" no matter what I did with the variables. I can't tell if this is a glitch in the program or operator error: maybe after one hour of futzing with this I still didn't pick the right combo of variables for a sustainable score. Perhaps it is the secret true message of the test. My guess is that if I could adjust for the total population of the earth that the score would change. In other words, with almost seven billion human beings on the planet, there is no shade of green that is green enough. But if there were, say, only 3 million of us, we could use running water and electricity in good health.
Sometimes I think that our standards of living (running water, antibiotics, electricity, etc.) are simply incompatible with our resources. If we want to live in mud huts and die in childbirth, we've got it made. But if we want to live sophisticated, healthy lives, the planet dies. Is there a middle path here? Anywhere? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Sunday, June 8, 2008
My eco-footprint according to EcoFoot.Org
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4 comments:
I agree that the only way the planet can truely sustain our standards of living is if there were less of us. Less people, less strain on resources. But if you listen to all the doom sayers, some nasty plague is coming soon that will kill most of us off anyway. Sad, ain't it?
The Good Plague is what I call that. Another alternative is population control (birth control, needing a license to have kids, etc.), but who gets to decide who gets to breed? It really can be overwhelmingly sad, this current state of affairs. But, I find hope in the idea that when things get THIS bad, people are willing to take action.
Hi Melina,
I have such a problem with these quizzes. When they talk green built homes it has to be the kind of homes contractors call green not earthships. They don't take into consideration that the beef I eat is raised on mountainous desert terrain that doesn't support any other kind of agriculture. It doesn't take into account that 99% of our electricity is generated via solar, or that we use a composting toilet, or that I don't use mass transit because, a.) there isn't any here, and b.) when I'm not presenting workshops I'm travelling under 35 miles a week for my one trip into town. Other than that it is shank's mare all the way.
These quizzes, and I've tried several seem to have several underlying assumptions that ignore earthship dwellers.
Didi
Didi,
I agree! I think it may actually be impossible to make a one-size-fits-all quiz. A proper energy audit, one that takes into account all the individualized variables any given household has, is the best way to go.
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