Sunday, January 25, 2009

My Ecological Footprint

After taking the quiz via the website my ecological footprint was determined to be 3.6 Earths. I believe the main reasons for it being so high are due to the fact that I live in a household with four other roommates and that our combined resource usage (electricity, gas, waste, etc) is higher then an average household (such as a household with only two occupants).

The disturbing thing is that everyone in my household already does quite a bit to reduce our footprint. Examples of strategies our household uses include: an organic garden on our side yard (where ornamental grass used to grow), a compost box that both recycles household food waste and provides fertilizer for our garden, recycling of everything that can be recycled, energy efficient appliances, and a bio-diesel producer that we use to turn our used cooking oil into fuel for one of our diesel vehicles. Examples of our garden and bio-diesel producer can be seen by visiting greensol.org (Note: You will have to type the address in a new window as the link isn't functioning-both the garden and bio-diesel producer were projects specifically designed for our household by Green Sol, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit I started with a friend of mine two years ago).
The changes we hope to make in the future include retro-fitting solar panels and wind turbines (as time and funding for Green Sol permits) to provide all of the energy our household needs.
It should be evident by my non-profit and sustainable practices thus far that this matter is of great concern to me :)
The long term effects of all of us living with such large ecological footprints should be obvious. If not, let me just say that all of us, right now, are contributing to an unsustainable way of life; a way of life that will eventually lead to our species demise and the demise of the majority of other species on our planet.
Of course its not fair that our country (which has one of the smallest populations on Earth) consumes the majority of resources. However, I believe this fact will not change as long as we are slaves to our monetary system. That topic I will leave for another time (my blog group would be just such a time) and end by saying that people in other countries are already being effected by what the industrialized world has been doing for decades. The bottom line is that those people wont have to worry about scrounging for resources because if we as a society continue on the path we are on people will simply cease to exist. Maybe that's not such a bad thing though . . . but its unfortunate how many other species we will take with us.