ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT

Count Yourself IN!!

Carl Sagan, a scientist, once described our planet as a “pale blue dot floating in space.” It’s a good description because over 70% of the earth’s surface is water. There is no other place that we can go to get the things we need to live. The earth gives us water, food and keeps us warm. It gives us everything we need in order to live.

You will spend every second of your life on earth. It is your home. It is beautiful. And it is special because it has life on it. The Earth is home to lots of living things – you, your pets, your family, the polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba and even the baby beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Seaway. We all live here and we have to make room for everyone. We have to share.

Scientists can add up all the little things we do every day to measure how well we are sharing. Imagine a house. If you build a bigger house, then you need more wood, bricks, furniture and electricity. More of everything. Think about the extra wood you will need for a larger house. Someone somewhere must cut down more trees in a forest to get more wood. If you were to take a fieldtrip through that forest, it would be smaller. The larger house has left a smaller forest. This reduces the habitat area of the wildlife that called that forest home.

If you walk along a beach, you have an effect on the beach. You leave a footprint behind in the sand. Everyday our actions and our choices add up and have an effect on the earth. We call this effect an Ecological Footprint. It’s not a real footprint, but it is the way we measure the effect and impacts our choices have on the Earth.  An Ecological Footprint is a way to measure what we use on the earth. It helps us share and compare our lives with other people on the earth.

To measure our Ecological Footprint, we count all the things we use each day to live the way we do. We add up the plants and animals we eat; the water we drink and use to cook our foods or clean with; the wood and oil we use to build and heat our homes and the gas we use in our tractors and cars; the plants we grow to make our clothing; and the things we throw away.

We use hectares to measure an area of land. Our Ecological Footprint is the area of land we use to live the way we do, so we use hectares to measure it. A hectare is equal to a square of land that is one hundred metres by one hundred metres. That is as large as the grassy area of a 400 m track. It is almost exactly the size of a baseball field.

The earth is able to produce lots of food and water and shelter for everyone and everything that lives here. There is enough room for everyone if we all share it equally. The “Fair Earth Share” per person would be about the size of 3 ½ football fields or 11 NHL hockey rinks or 1.8 hectares. And there would still be lots of room for all the animals.

Some people live in a way that uses very few resources. They have small footprints. People in Afghanistan have a footprint of 0.3 hectares. People in India use .9 hectares. People in Jamaica use 1.1 hectares. If we all lived that way there would be plenty of room for everyone and all the animals.

In Canada, our average Ecological Footprint is 7.6 hectares per person. That would be equal to 760 metres by 100 metres. That is about the size of 48 NHL hockey rinks. Or 17 football fields. Or about 5 city blocks. 7.6 hectares could hold the Great Pyramid of Giza with 4 football fields to spare.

If everyone on earth had a footprint as big as the average Canadian, we would need four planet earths to give us all the stuff we want. That’s because Canadians use more energy than anyone else on earth. We use more water, throw away more garbage and buy more things than most people on the earth. We are often called “super consumers”.

And our one earth, the beautiful planet we call home, can’t support all the people living like we do. As Canadians, we are using four times our fair Earth share. Many other people live with far less so we can live the way we do. This hurts the earth and the people who have to live with less than what they need in order survive well. Eventually we will run out of things. And other animals and plants will run out of things too.

We can turn things around and make our Ecological Footprint smaller. We can create more green space. We can use less energy. We can clean up the water and the air and stop making so much garbage. We can start just by making better choices.

Imagine if every one of us did one little thing. If every one of the 35,000,000 Canadians bought one less bottle of water a year, imagine how that would all add up. That’s 35,000,000 fewer bottles to make, and 35 million fewer bottles to throw away.

Turn off the lights when you leave the room. Turn off the tap while you brush your teeth. Eat a local apple. Walk to school if you can. If you do, it makes a difference. You can make an even bigger difference if you convince your family and friends to join you.

Count Yourself In. Reduce your Ecological Footprint!