Survey measures our collective impacts
Thanks to all you who responded to the survey that I put out in the column two weeks ago with your individual environmental footprints. There were 55 of you, and I’m grateful to each person who took the time to answer the questions. In writing a summary of the results, I feel somewhat like I am handing back a midterm exam to a college class.
The number of Earths that would be required to support the entire 7.9 billion people on the planet if they were to live with your individual lifestyle and consumption habits ranged from a low of 0.6 Earths to a high of 6.2 Earths. There was just one respondent (a couple) who came in under one Earth, and they live an extremely spartan lifestyle.
Overall, the average of those 55 readers who took the survey and sent me their results was 3.3 Earths, which we clearly don’t have. This isn’t really rocket science, but sooner or later, there are going to be even more serious shortages of water, food and energy beyond the places around the planet where food and water are already in short supply.
Many of you were surprised, or dare I say shocked, to see how large your environmental footprint was based on the survey questions and your answers. Because we live in a community that prides itself on being environmentally friendly and conscious of our individual and community impacts, I think it was hard for many to believe that their lifestyle meant 3 or 4 or 5 Earths would be required to provide for the Earth’s population. Comments like: “I’m shocked,” “Yikes,” “Wow,” “Oh my,” ”Ouch,” “Damn,” “Eye opening,” “We’re doomed,” were common, along with a number of other interesting responses.
There are many of you who feel that you are living a reasonably environmentally sustainable and sensitive lifestyle: driving a Prius, electric car, or taking public transportation or riding a bike; eating little or no red meat; not buying a lot of new stuff; taking only a few plane trips; keeping the thermostat low; and putting in solar panels, but were surprised that your footprint was so large.
I think what we often don’t think about is that what we would consider environmentally
friendly or low impact and may in fact be low impact compared to our neighbors, friends, or others, but relative to the total amount of energy or resources required, is still not sustainable for the planet.
I think that in order to make the footprint survey relatively straightforward and easy to take, that the number of questions and the complexity had to be kept to a minimum. And there were things that weren’t included, but I feel that the major items or impacts were captured in the questions.
There are also a few large footprint activities that we may not have thought about as having all that large of an impact. Plane flights are one of those. A few cross-country flights a year really push your numbers up in a hurry. And you can retake the survey and leave off your flights and see how much it changes your number of required Earths.
While we may drive an electric car or one that gets good mileage, it still take a lot of limited resources to produce that automobile and keep it running. And while it’s tempting to place blame on those countries where populations are growing very quickly and the number of children per family is large, those countries by and large have much lower standards of living and consume much less resources per person than we do. A few examples include Haiti 0.4 Earths; Bangladesh 0.5 Earths; Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria all 0.6 Earths; Congo 0.7 and Cambodia 0.8 Earths.
Another way to compare total impacts by country is to multiply their environmental footprints by the population in each country. This is an easy way to see globally as a combination of the number of people and their average footprints which nations are having the greatest impacts. China ranks number one, followed by the United States, India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, Germany, South Korea and Canada rounding off the top 10. We all have a lot to do before we run out of resources.
One area where we can extend the lifetime of many of our available resources is through recycling and reuse and I believe we will see more and more of this in the future. When it comes to energy, if it isn’t renewable (wind and solar being the big ones), we will eventually runout.