Tuesday, September 26, 2006

my footprint

So I took the test at www.myfootprint.org, and while I'll agree that I'm not as environmentally sensitive as I should be, I think the recycling, composting and other day-to-day things we do here at the house make us a little better than this.

Nah. I'm probably just being defensive.



CATEGORY GLOBAL ACRES
Food 6.9
Mobility 1
Shelter 7.4
Goods/Services 5.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 21
In comparison, the average ecological footprint in your country is 24 global acres per person.

Worldwide, there exists 4.5 biologically productive global acres per person.

If everyone lived like you, we would need 4.7 planets.

2 comments:

MJ said...

You mean the wife's twister tie collection didn't buy you guys a few less acres? I am really suprised though, I think it's fixed because we did about the same and we don't really think about nearly as much as you guys do. it's mostly because we're too poor to do all that much damage. if we had more money, we'd probably buy more useless crap that would end up in the landfill.

marauder34 said...

Well, I threw out not only her twisty-tie collection, but her 5-gallon bag of polystyrene peanuts as well. Surely that drove up our footprint somewhat ...

Natasha's total footprint was 10 acres:

FOOD: 5.4
MOBILITY: 0.2
SHELTER: 2.2
GOODS/SERVICES: 1.7

As I noted to her, I do eat more than her -- probably why I'm overweight -- and I also drive the girls to school while she walks to work, but I was surprised that I rate 7.4 acres for my shelter, while she rated just 2.2 acres.

We probably differed in our estimates of the size of the house -- I'm pretty sure her estimate of 800 square feet is well below reality.

She noted: "I also marked the energy efficient electricity because we only use air when we need it, buy efficient applicances when we buy them, and generally are better at not leaving on things we aren't using and at using fewer electric items than most people in this country. Were there any other questions that had to do with shelter? Besides, I rewear my clothes before I give them to you to wash. Neener neener."