“Being green is more than just buying ‘eco’. It is an unshakable commitment to a sustainable lifestyle.” Jennifer Nini
In the first essay in this series I described how I came to try to live with the behavior and consumption equivalent to the productive capacity of one earth – the one and only earth that we have – the ‘one earth’ calculation based on The Ecological Footprint. This important accounting measure needs to be better and more generally understood.
The linked long explanation of Ecological Footprint should be on every concerned person’s reading list (I hope that many reading here will, at least, look at it before reading on); my very brief recap doesn’t do justice. The Ecological Footprint work is a serious and exhaustive accounting research project, developed from the most respected and reviewed information sources available, of the human use of the earth’s resources and of the earth’s productive capacity. The effort began in 1991 with the simple, researchable question: “How much do people take compared to what the earth can renew?” And the effort has been added to and refined progressively; always inviting criticism and responding with continual improvements in methods of analysis and data collection.
It must be clearly noted that the comparisons of the human use the earth’s resources and the capacity of the earth’s production and restoration produced by the Ecological Footprint research are very conservative and leave out, because of lack of fully verifiable data, potential human interventions in the environment and losses to earth’s production and restoration potential . The errors in footprint comparisons are almost certainly in the direction of showing less actual human use and impact than is occuring.
The Ecological Footprint evaluation has two primary uses: as a policy tool for government and business, by those governments and businesses that have concern for the longevity of life on earth (shockingly, it seems some do not); and the personal evaluation as an educational tool to inform the public about the needed changes in lifestyle if the human use of the earth’s resources are to return to sustainable levels. It is this second apparently more aspirational use of footprint evaluation that I will deal with here.
What makes the use of the individual evaluation tool confusing is that essentially no one will discover that they are using the earth’s resources at a sustainable level.It can be reasonably assumed that everyone using the tool will find that they are using 3, 4, 8 or 10 earths’ worth of productivity for their lifestyle if everyone on the earth lived as they do; and that even with this information, few have any intention of changing the fundamentals of their lifestyle to reduce their impact: Recycle, yes. Install water saving showerheads, yes. Consider or actually purchase an electric auto, yes. Attempt to buy more locally produced foods, yes. And a variety of other ‘environmentally’ friendly actions, yes. But, deep substantive changes, no. There are good reasons for this that need to be made clear.
First, it would be devastatingly disruptive of present economic systems, social systems and individual lives if a substantial part of the population seriously reduced their footprint. Second, it would only ‘make sense’ to most people (and to the planet) if almost everyone did it. And third, the biggest abusers of the planet’s resources are not individuals or not individuals in the ordinary sense.
What follows is a look at various common lifestyles and the Ecological Footprints generated by the online tool; here are the questions the online tool asks, given in a cursory form: consumption of animal origin foods, consumption of local foods, house type and energy efficiency, house size and numbers of people, source of electricity, garbage amounts, use of cars and other personal vehicles, use of public transportation and, finally, the frequency of air travel. The summing together of responses to these questions correlate well with overall use of earth’s resources.
The default answers, not necessarily the most common, but common enough, result in the use of 3.2 earths (I will shorthand in this way, number of earths, though it is to be understood that the meaning includes ‘if everyone lived this lifestyle’). A generally mode/median* non-city lifestyle, income $50 to $70 thousand per year, 3 people in a small to medium sized freestanding house, with little effort to act on ecological concerns, gives the use of 4.8 earths. A city mode/median lifestyle for apartment dwellers with essentially the same behaviors as the non-city lifestyle gives a use of 4.2 earths.
A solidly middle class, upper middle class, lifestyle with little ecological concern, larger house, 3 people, $150+K income, more travel, essentially more of many consumables gives a use of up to 10 earths or more. The tool fails to be able to properly evaluate higher incomes beyond the middle classes. People and collectives of people with vastly greater use of resources no longer are described by these questions. Other measures than the online tool are needed for someone who flies regularly in private jets; has multiple houses, apartments and yachts with staff to maintain them; fleets of autos and trucks; and unlimited budgets for toys, foods and entertainment.
But, what about those people in the general population, in the US, who are making a serious effort to reduce their impact on earth’s resources? A mode/median non-city household of 3 people living in the same sized house as above, with the same income, can with some effort, reduce their footprint to 2 earths. A mode/median apartment dwelling household of 3 people with even more serious effort can reduce their footprint to 1.7 earths, the world average.
The obvious question is: what has to be done to reduce the footprint? All the measures of consumption must be lower: very little garbage (a measure of general consumption), minimal air travel (6 hours a year) or no air travel, minimal auto (50 miles a week in a high mileage car averaged over the year) or no auto use, public transportation use, little to no animal origin foods, about 70% or more of food from local sources, increasing the energy efficiency of the smallest functional home, renewably sourced energy/electricity:
And still the Ecological Footprint is most often between 2 and 3 earths even with effort to reduce environmental impact! Obviously, to get the whole population to an average consumption of one earth would require even less consumption and energy use by all levels of society. The current public argument is for the burden to be on the Great Many whose use exceeds the earth’s productive capacities by 2, 4 or 6 earths, not the 10s or several 10s of earths of the most profligate. At this time there is no plan in general circulation for how to reach the needed reductions in total human impact on earth’s systems; even without a plan it seems clear that major restructuring of the world’s economic systems would be required: there is no major economic system or socially valued expectations for how to live that isn’t based on economic growth and increasing consumption.
Even still, getting to one earth must not be considered only an aspirational goal; there is no other alternative but for the human global consumption of the earth’s productivity to be less than that productivity. It is a concept so simple that 7 year olds can grasp it (Piaget’s stages of development). And, as noted, the present world average is 1.7 earths.
The questions are then: Will the needed changes in the economic and social systems be based in economic equity and social justice? Will the needed changes force all or almost all deprivation onto the weakest and most vulnerable? Will action on these issues be ignored and put off until the failure of earth’s productive systems so limit human life and activities that humans are forced to take less from the remaining productive capacity?
It is fairly clear that an economically powerful segment of humanity is moving in the direction of setting up conditions that will place the greatest burden on the weakest and most vulnerable; even to make more of the world’s people vulnerable by increasingly marginalizing them. While not fully offering an argument against that approach to our dilemmas, it is almost certain that the result would be to exacerbate all of our challenges and prevent effective responses to social, economic and environmental crises. As far from the possible as it may seem, one line of rational reasoning offers the conclusion that only a general response that addresses the three overwhelming issues, economic inequity, the lack of social justice and environmental degradation, would have a chance to avoid the variety of conflagrations facing us.
We humans have been very good at adapting to our destructiveness, most often calling it progress (but, be clear, damaging ecological relationships and the earth’s biophysical systems is destructiveness). We adapt to what we have already put into place with incredible inventiveness. Now is the time to find a further capacity: pre-adaptation, adapting to most likely futures. We haven’t been good at that; and now we must, because failure to limit our damaging actions and failure to prepare our whole social and economic systems for that future will almost certainly deny us a future all together.
The use of the Ecological Footprint tool and the result, that vast numbers of us are using more of the earth’s capacity than can be renewed, must inform us of the need for action on the real issues, not just on our own consumption. The economic and social systems in place make living at one earth consumption effectively impossible for many of the earth’s highest consuming populations; while we should try to reduce our consumption, that effort needs to go hand in hand with developing new models for social and economic life that more closely align with ecological realities and to the activism to give those efforts, and us, a chance.
*I am using the terms ‘mode/median’ to indicate measures of central tendency that describe the more common conditions. The arithmetic average, the mean, is a poor measure for describing the most common conditions in highly skewed number sets like the income and wealth levels of developed countries, especially the US.
