Rebecca Doody
6/20/14
GNED 162
My Ecological Footprint
After answering the questions about my consumption uses and how I live, the footprint calculator showed that it takes 21.5 acres, or about 8.7 hectares of Earth’s productive area to support my lifestyle. In total, if everyone lived like me we would need 4.8 Planet Earths to provide enough resources. My results were close to the average American footprint.
When I explored the scenarios about how to reduce my ecological footprint, most of them did not make much of a difference. However, individually, if I pledged to buy products that use less packaging or are made of 100% post-consumer recycled material, it would reduce my ecological footprint by .5. Therefore, we would only need 4.3 Planet Earths compared to my original 4.8 Planet Earths if everyone lived like me. However, I think that would be the hardest change for me to adopt because many of the things I currently use I do not buy myself. Also, many products I need are either not sold in that kind of packaging or do not specify what kind of material they’re packed in.
I think the easiest change I could adopt out of the scenarios given would be to pledge to use public transportation one more day each week instead of driving my car. I think this would be the easiest because I live on a college campus for most of the year. There are both city and campus buses to take me around to most of the place I use my car to get to. Therefore, public transportation is both easily accessible and makes the most sense. Although when I’m home for breaks and summer time it is harder to use public transportation, I still carpool often which still lowers my pollution.
When I put myself in someone else’s shoes in another part of the world, my footprint was drastically smaller. I picked Brazil as my country. There is a big contrast in the way people live there. According to my research, about 25 million people live impoverished in slums, while other Brazilians live in upper and middle class. For my footprint, I picked to be one of the poor Brazilians. They live in crowded, tiny houses with little meat products to eat. They also do not travel and use transportation much because many are unemployed and have no place to go. The ecological footprint calculator said that if everyone lived in the same lifestyle as a poor person in the Brazilian slums, we would need 1 Planet Earth.
I was originally happy that my Brazilian ecological footprint fit exactly with how much Planet Earth space is actually available, but after looking at the data table of the footprints for Brazil, I realized that my estimated footprint was way off. The ecological footprint of consumption according to the data is 2.9 Planet Earths for Brazil compared to my 1 Planet Earth. To break it down even further, the cropland is about 32% higher, the grazing land is about 63% higher, the forest land is about 34% higher, the fishing ground is about 14% higher, and the built-up land is about 8% higher than what my ecological footprint I did for an individual in Brazil showed. Brazil is also an ecological creditor according to the data. It is green for the use of available land.
Overall, I think my estimated Brazil country footprint findings were considerablyoff because I focused on only an individual in poverty in Brazil. Once the upper and middle class average consumption rates are added in, I believe the average country footprint would be higher as the data table shows.
Works Cited
(2014). Brazilians. Countries and Their Cultures. Retrieved from