footprints

[T0Mi]

Has anyone checked out sites like http://www.earthday.net/footprint2/flash.html ?

It calculates your "footprint" you will leave behind when you are gone.
"Footprint" means the number of earths needed if everyone on this planet would live your kind of lifestyle.

I'm scoring a lame 2,9.

[Gambit37]

Most people in the western world will have something well over 1. Unfortunately, even though most westerners now have a good grasp of the problem, very few are actually bothering to change their life styles. It'll all collapse within the next hundred years though and we'll go back to simpler living. Shame I'll be dead; I can't wait!

[Duckman]

I have not cheked thta page but I have seen one where it tells you how large is your "ecologic footprint", meaning how much about you exhaust land on earth with your spending. It was finnish, can't remember where it was.

These give a good idea about your lifestyle, BUT they aren't nearly accurate. If you die at early age the real result might even be under 1, for example.

[Jan]

One of my colleagues made a large research on ecological footprint, she calculated ecological footprint of Czechoslovakia in development for every year since 1920 and compared it with data on Austria. So I know that this indicator is very "educative", but also very rough and inaccurate. It's rather old - today we have better (but maybe not that "educative") measures.

If you die at early age the real result might even be under 1, for example.

I haven't checked the mentioned website yet, the original method may be very simplified or altered there, but ecological footprint should normally be calculated per annum, using data on actual consumption etc., and thus showing your "current" or annual consumption.

[Sophia]

I call bullshit.

I scored a rather deplorable 3.5 (which is funny, because I conserve a lot more than most people I know) but anyway, I went back and re-did it using the most "third world" answers I could come up with. That is, infrequent meat, 100% locally grown food, no electricity, no running water, 7+ people in a house, no car, etc. Not much recycling, either, but anyway-- I still came up with a score of 3.2. So whatever.

On the other hand, if I lived in Switzerland, I'd apparently only need 2.1 Earths to sustain more or less my same lifestyle, or, at least, to answer the quiz about the same way. I guess the best thing I can do for the environment, then, is pack up and move to Switzerland.

[Jan]

But you have to swim there.

EDIT: If anyone is more interested in these things, I can only recommend results of the research of our Austrian colleagues - go to http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/2841.htm and click on "Get Data". You can download an Excel file. In this file, look in sheets "Material flows" and "Energy flows". Data on "Metabolic rate" (energy per capita per year) on lines 41 (Materials) and 47 (Energies) give you a good comparison of energy and material consumption patterns in different countries. Of course, it is a "top-down" approach, i.e. it doesn't take into account variations between individual people, but only average data for countries, so of course "Western post-materialists and environmentalists" have a better profile then their country's averages.

[cowsmanaut]

Am I supposed to have a higher number or a lower.. because I'm way up there