Today I went to my internship, as I do every Thursday. I really didn’t want to go to work today. I felt like sleeping in and informing my supervisor that my car battery had died, but I’m a poor liar – the guilt eats away at me. So I dragged my body out of bed, threw on the clothing I had worn the day before (it was business casual), brushed my teeth and drove to work only to discover that my supervisor wasn’t coming in today. The other employees did not know what busy work to give me, so I sat in front of my computer and calculated my ecological and carbon footprint multiple times.
Averaging the results from the many different sites I used to calculate my footprints, we would need 4 worlds to support the human population if everyone on Earth lived as I do (my ecological footprint) and I emitted around 7 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere this past year. These results are quite horrible and so I decided to see what would happen if I changed certain aspects of my life. My eating habits are the worst (I don’t eat fresh or locally grown produce – I don’t really it produce at all. So I entered the data pretending that I did it locally and organically. My ecological footprint shrunk but not by much. I then decided to try lowering the impact of my other activities. Soon enough I had made myself a vegan that grows her own produce or buys it at the farmer’s market. All the waste I create was composted in my hypothetical bin and I recycled the few goods I bought. I no longer owned a car, took any form of public transportation, or traveled further than I could bike. My footprint was still too large for 6 billion people to live as I do. So then I decided to change my living situation. Instead of living in a duplex with 4 people, I upped the residents to 7 (the maximum choice). I pretended that 100% of the energy was renewable and that my electricity and gas bills were only $5 a month (the lowest option). I pressed calculate once again. My ecological footprint was still over 2 worlds. I was shocked. I had chosen the most ecologically friendly option for every question. Yet, there are too many people for everyone to live as I “would” (without transportation, meat, and fossil fuels). All I have left to do is hope the calculator was broken and attempt to live as sustainably as possible.
(On a positive note, through a different site I was actually able to lower my footprint to only 1.7 worlds by living a life I felt is attainable and fulfilling.)
I can definitely relate on the carbon footprint number since mine was higher at 13.5 for the year. This number came up despite my being a vegetarian. I definitely don't eat or buy locally grown food. I also eat a lot of take out and usually whenever I shop for clothes and such, there is a lot of packaging. I don't even notice the amount of stuff I buy or where my food is coming from. It's crazy that even after you put in the lowest numbers into the calculator it still is not enough to sustain 6 billion people. I think the first step would be cutting down our number to that used by other countries and then the next step would be below that to the level where we can still distribute the world's resources to more people than we already do.
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