Ecological Footprints: Confessions of a Big Foot
Kim Todd takes the Ecological Footprint Quiz and shares her results.
January/February 2004
By Kim Todd
The first few blocks of pavement are steep enough that apartments look like they’d slide off their foundations with the slightest nudge and drivers reach for the emergency brake at each stop sign. Trudging up the hill with a book-laden backpack is a strain, but the payoff at the top is the view east to San Francisco Bay. Sweat pricks at the back of my neck and my muscles ache, but I’m not trying to drop a dress size or strengthen my calves on this urban hike. I’m reducing my ecological footprint.
The Ecological Footprinting Quiz, designed by the Oakland, California, group Redefining Progress, shows individuals how large a share of the earth’s resources they absorb. Questions on gas mileage, house size, and dining habits pinpoint consumption patterns. Driving long distances requires miles of roads and land devoted to energy production. Living in a large house means developing ground for a foundation and yard. Eating meat translates into the need for pastures where cattle can graze. Quiz results are computed in the number of productive acres—fishing grounds, forests, or agricultural fields—needed to maintain a given lifestyle. Compared with residents of other countries, U.S. citizens require far more than their share of land—an average of twenty-four acres per person. This, on a planet that provides four-and-a-half productive acres for every individual. Canadians use seventeen acres; Italians, nine; Pakistanis, less than two.
Curious about my own impact, I took the test. As I scanned the page, Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese,” came to mind. You do not have to be good, she writes. Such comforting words when guilt creeps in about the paper plates tossed out at the last party and the bag of pink Styrofoam peanuts that sat in my kitchen waiting to be reused until I finally threw them away. But Mary, be real. I do have to be good. Otherwise, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
She continues:
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
If only that were true. The quiz looks like a tax form. In a way it is, tallying up the excesses and economies of the past year, all my environmental virtues and flaws. Clumped into sections covering food, shelter, and mobility, the questions promise rigorous accounting of my weight on the world. A small glimmer of hope flickers, though. I’m a recycling, composting, non-red-meat eater who doesn’t drive much. How bad could it be?
Here’s how judgment day went:
Food
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