The last time I ever thought about ecological footprints and other assorted stuff was during ID110 and ID120 where scores of professors were trying in vain to infuse a sense of environmental awareness to three full(or should I say empty? ) lecture halls of students. Though I did understand the full import of the concept, I did not heed that much to it, mainly because, back home, ecological awareness, though not visible in an explicit fashion, has been a key factor in our attitude and outlook towards life. Many things – such as consumption of freshly prepared food in place of packaged and processed food, and a high incidence of vegetarianism( I’m not saying non-vegetarians are ruining the planet; the processes involved in making meat palatable are. You can an example here ) So much so that, given our impressive population, we would drain all resources of the planet in no time if we were to be living like the Americans. So I was partly confident that there wasn’t much fault on the part of our people in the overall ruining of the world.
To see how far my convictions are true, I checked the Earth day Footprint Quiz – as how I used to be, when I was back home at Chennai. This quiz gives a short summary of the ecological footprint taken up by every one of your activities, and also tells you how many earths would we need if people were to live like what you’ve just described. And here are the results:
As I was back in Chennai:
CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES FOOD 0.3 MOBILITY 0.8 SHELTER 0.4 GOODS/SERVICES 0.6 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 2.1
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 0.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.2 PLANETS.
Just feels good to see that if people lived like me, a little more than our planet’s capabilities are enough to sustain us. You can take this quiz here.
Note: As I copy-pasted the results into the block quote, I realised this: THE RESULTS ARE FULL OF SPACER GIFS! And this showed up as little boxes wherever the images were not found. I had to remove them by hand – teaches me not to copy anything directly over from a website ever again.
