Recitation Exercise 3: Your
Ecological Footprint
Student
name:___________________________ TA name: ______________________
No matter how you feel about environmental issues and
threats, the simple fact is that each of our lifestyles and consumption patterns
does rely on natural resources and production systems that transform nature
into consumer products, as well as create waste and pollution. One concept that
has evolved to assess this impact is called the "ecological
footprint": the volume of land and resources appropriated to support a
person, a population, a city, country, etc. The concept developed out of the
earlier, simpler formula: I = PAT, where human Impact on the earth is a factor
of Population, Affluence (a surrogate for consumption) and Technology (a
measure of how that consumption is met).
To get a feel for the way that individual and collective
consumption affects land and resources, calculate your ecological footprint.
Please be aware that these calculations are used often as a critique of human
consumption. We make efforts in this class to examine human use of the earth from
different ideological perspectives, but we ask you to be open to this exercise
as one way of thinking about our relationship to nature. Go to:
http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp
Calculate your ecological footprint, and write it below (if
you find and prefer another footprint calculator, use it and give us its web
address, and be sure to specify the units it uses to express your footprint).
You may use either your “home” footprint or your current student footprint, but
do specify. Then, recalculate your footprint with changes in lifestyle and
consumption to determine which three changes would bring about the
largest reduction in footprint. Why do you think this makes a difference?
My ecological footprint: ____________ (
Home or Student?)
1. New footprint:
What
lifestyle changes?:
Why the
difference?:
2. New footprint:
What
lifestyle changes?:
Why the
difference?:
3. New footprint:
What
lifestyle changes?:
Why the
difference?: