OT: Ecological footprint quiz

Whistle
1

This is something I’ve wanted to see for a while:

http://www.myfootprint.org/ Ecological footprint quiz

I’ve known for a while that the way we use the earth’s resources is unsustainable. This gives a tool for quantifying just how unsustainable.

According to these folks, the average US citizen uses resources at a rate that would require 5.1 planets if everyone on earth consumed at the same rate :boggle:

There is also a website with more information at http://www.rprogress.org/programs/sustainability/ef/

I couldn’t stand the result I got on the quick screener (4.5 earths) so I downloaded the long form excel quiz and got what I think more accurately represents my eco-minded lifestyle (3.2 earths.)

I also used the quiz to figure out what level of austerity is needed to get to 1 earth and it’s not impossibly harsh, just very basic.

  • Joel
2

Thomas Malthus’s predictions also indicated that by now we should have covered the earth’s surface with people. These kinds of dire warnings are rather simplistic assesments of systems that have innumerable factors at work, and which change almost daily with new developments.

3

There was/is a 5+ year bet going between two people in the news. They may be investment specialists, one claiming that we’re using up the resources and the other claiming that we’re not doing anything of the sort. He says we’re creating new methods of locating and extracting resources, and that the doomsday predictions area crock.

They staked their bet on one ‘limited’ resource and watched it over the period. The doomsdayer lost, as all sorts of new lodes were found. I believe they were watching nickel or tin production.

I wish I could find more info on it. Anyway, I’m still a conservationist, but it gives me pause to realize that when I was 14-15 years old they claimed we’d be out of oil by the time I was 21. Not.

If anyone knows where I can find the article on th above mentioned bet, I’d love to reread it. It had to have been some 10 years ago.

4

I got 2.2 planets. I do think that the american lifestyle isn’t an option for the entire globe, but I don’t think the end of the world is nigh either. FWIW, I walk everywhere when I’m at school. No car, rarely I’ll take a bus if I have to go to wal*mart or something, but I will admit I absolutely hate cars, I hate driving them, I hate riding in them, I hate having to cross streets where drivers seem all too happy to run me down, and they’re a total nuisance. :moreevil:

5

Woohoo! 5 planets!

But i suspect that changing my answers down in a few questions where i was borderline would change the result a lot. For example, changing “how often do you ride with someone else” from “almost never” to “occasionally” moved me to 4.7 planets.

6

The only prediction of that nature that seems about right, is John Brunner’s, from the book “Stand on Zanzibar” (look it up - Zanzibar is a beentsy island off the east coast of Africa - Tanzania, to be precise). At this moment in history, every man, woman and child alive on the planet today, could stand on the island of Zanzibar, and nobody would get their feet wet in the ocean.

I imagine it would smell really horrendous, though… :astonished:

serpent

7

My total footprint was nine acres, and I got a result of 2.1 planets. Doing pretty well, but could be better! :slight_smile:

~Andrea

8

About this subject, I really believe caring “too much” certainly cannot hurt. Even if the predictions are somewhat inaccurate, if everybody became a little more concerned, we would err on the right side, don’t you think?

The short quiz gave me 8 acres (1.8 planets). Joeln, I didn’t see any links to the longer quiz you mention?

9

2.1 earths for me. And by the way, choosing the most environmentally friendly option for each question gives exactly 1.0. Doesn’t seem to allow for people who could possibly be below that curve.

10

Thinking of it, the fact that i fly to Europe or Brazil from time to time to see family (so more than 10 hours of flight per year, easily) probably pushed me over the edge into major planetary destruction. I’m still less than your average US-Midwest-ner, though.

11

Darn! I only got 16 acres and 3 and 1/2 planets. I guess I better trade my Neon in on a Navigator! :laughing:

By the way, that survey is an excellent example of bad science. Several of the questions didn’t even allow for perfectly ordinary responses that would have skewed the results one way or the other and the entire survey makes assumptions that aren’t necessarily valid for even a majority of the population, let alone an individual – yet the survey purports to evaluate an individual’s resource footprint – patently ridiculous.

John

12

I looked at the quiz, then looked away. As far as I can see, it’s a pretty standard guilt-induction device. I didn’t stay around long enough for the almost inevitable fund-raising plea. I’ve been around too many years and have too few left to obsess about things I either can’t or won’t change.

13

While I agree that doomsday predictions don’t always come true, and that surveys such as these are simplistic…


As far as humans changing the planet goes, type in “global warming” or “climate change” into the google news search, and you’ll see that we are in all probability changing the climate of the planet in ways that will continue to be felt for…how long? Hundreds of years? Thousands?

The glaciers of the world are melting. The Snows of Kilamanjaro, that Hemingway wrote about, will soon be no longer. Huge sections of ice shelves in the Antarctic are splitting off and melting in the ocean. The ice in the Arctic is thinning, and in the near future there will be times of the year when the ocean is ice free…

This isn’t just about glaciers and ice, though. It’s about plants and animals becoming extinct because they can’t adapt fast enough to the climate, and because they can’t migrate past all the freeways, suburbs, and shopping malls that humans have thrown up everywhere. It’s about people on low lying islands having to relocate because the ocean is rising and will cause storm surges to literally wash over the island. It’s about hunting peoples not being able to follow their traditional life because the animals they depend on are not able to survive (animals of the arctic, especially). It’s about thousands of people in Europe dying this past summer in the drawn out heat wave.

This is happening, folks. It’s just that it’s so slow and so variable, that it seems that it isn’t happening. And it’s that humans are so adaptable, that we get used to something, even if in the end it kills us.

An example: a week ago it was in the 90 degree range out here in Northern California, odd enough for the end of October. Then, seemingly overnight, the temperature plummeted and now the temperature during the day is in the low 50’s. Is this normal??? Everywhere people are saying how strange the weather is, but do we realize that it’s part of a larger global change?

A scientist said that the temperature of the Arctic is becoming the warmest it has in more than 100,000 years. Is this part of a normal trend? And, even if it’s true that the earth has warmed and cooled before, the fact that the earth is becoming as warm as it has, in as short a time as it has, is definately not normal.


Empires have risen and fallen, and the United States is an empire that has spread its influence around the globe (for good and for naught). But never before has an empire promoted a way of life that has spread so far, and been so damaging for the planet. Now, everyone (mostly) wants to live like an American, where in our endless search for fullfillment we are destroying the only home we have. And it all seems tied in to our insatiable appetite for more.

In an article I have, an Indian chief commented: See how cruel the whites look.. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad.

I’m not attacking whites-after all, I’m one myself. And there are positive traits that we have. But the flip side of that is a never-ending search for something outside ourselves to fill that empty place inside. We are so materially oriented, and yet, with all the goodies that we surround ourselves with, most of us are still not happy or satisfied. I thought it interesting that in my psychology class we learned that the individualism of Americans is an anomaly. Most cultures in the world promote working together, and where the community comes first, not the individual. Whereas Americans promote “getting what’s mine”, and let others take care of themselves. That’s putting it simply, of course, but the breakdown in family also matches the extreme focus on self fullfillment that this culture applauds.


Speaking of applauding, I applaud everyone who is doing what they can to help conserve resources and make do with less. In this age of excess, can we seek a simpler way? As Rome was decaying and tottering, thoughtful people were asking the same question.

14

  1. Zanzibar… Yeah, that would solve the overpopulation problem: a vast majority would immediately croak from lack of oxygen…

  2. 1 earth for the totally eco-aware people… So this makes not for “how many planets we need?”, but just as an arbitrary non-linear scale, just like Bofor’s or Richter’s.

  3. Kevin points out the problem of too numerous variables. However such vast problems can still be solved with a reasonable “fork” of valid results, by taking in account one purely physical “globalizing” variable.

For instance, the general equation of the Universe is “just” one of thermodynamics after all, and invented as a pure “mind experiment” by a mathematician. Well, it did predict some pretty originals results validated years later by the physicists, didn’t it?

Statistics are commonly dissed by the laymen, however probabilities also brought us quantic physics, the next big leap in hard science.

Some economic problems were rather practically modelled using the monetary mass notion–very much a physicist’s approach, too.

For earth balance, the thermodynamic approach is appalling. And we do have reasonably reliable sources to sum up the yearly production of thermal energy, or “cold energies” transformed to electricity; on the debit side, we also have reasonable statistic sources to figure out how much of this energy is again wasted into heat**.

BBS: gone to the kitchen, put some ice on my head…

* Note I spared you the “quantum”, just to avoid that awfully cheap pun. Not me kind. You just can’t have your quantum leap it, too.
**Morality: you can halve your coke and heat it, too.

15

Global warming has been a fact of life since the end of the last ice age – certainly before humans began burning fossil fuels. The fact of the matter is that the Earth’s climate is dynamic but science does not currently understand all of the “controls” behind it and can’t predict what is natural or normal. Are humans changing the climate? Possibly. Indeed, probably. But how much of that change is due to us and how much is natural? Is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing the increase of global temperatures or is the increase in global temperatures causing the increase of carbon dioxide? The fact is, nobody really knows. You can scream and cry about melting ice caps, but you may or may not be whinging about something we can’t control anyhow. That’s my one major issue with environmentalists, they go screaming “the sky is falling” at everything.

FWIW I do agree that a materialistic approach to life is pathetic and useless indeed, and all the money and stuff in the world will leave you feeling empty. I wish I could find that article that shows that American people are actually less happy today than they were 50 years ago when Americans had less money and junk.

16

This is such a complex issue that I never pay attention to anything offered in the way of a long term forecast. It is like Romans speculating about space travel. We currently live in an interglacial period of an ice age. 18,000 years ago the ocean levels were so low the Phillipines were one large island, the Persian Gulf was dry land, there were rivers flowing in what is now the seabed between the islands of Indonesia. Cliamotoligists don’t know for sure what the weather will be like in 18 days.
Which isin’t to say humans aren’t a force on the earth. We have already caused what in the fossil record will look like a mass extinction, of which there have been plenty already, the most famous being the Cretaceous terminary event that killed off the dinosaurs. But my own feelings about humanity as a whole are pretty detached. I’m no more appalled by the corporate sensibilities that hack up rain forest to raise beef for Whoppers than I am heartened by people camping out in old growth trees so they can’t be cut down. What more do you expect from a bunch of altruistic flesh eating upright walking chimps?
By the way the rain forests were a tenth their current size 18,000 years ago, too. And I’m cheering for the tree huggers. But let’s hear from the whistle playing corporate scum.