Filed under: Society + Media
My Footprint Quiz score…Total foot print:17. If everyone lived like you, we would need 3.8 planets.I thought my life was pretty environmentally friendly. (I tried Sundance Channel Green Quiz. My score was pretty good!) I don’t drive. I walk to school, downtown and even to Dillon’s for groceries. I recycle. I don’t take a long shower. I buy vintage clothes. I use a space heater instead of warming the whole apartment and open windows in summer. But it seems they are not enough. My footprint was mostly due to the way I eat and occasional air flights. I eat meat almost everyday. I’d love to eat fish but fish in Kansas are not as cheap and good as Japan.It is not easy for me to avoid processed food.I don’t mean to have a luxurious life. However as long as I live in the U.S., I think we cannot avoid a big footprint. It was good to know how much I’m consuming. But I’m a little skeptical about the quiz because it doesn’t consider geographical constraint. For example, fewer people drive in Tokyo because it has a good public transportation system. (Here’s the Web site discussing automobile industries and environmentalism in Japan: Buy a car and drive up your grocery bill) Also, there are many cows in America and the price of beef is cheaper than Japan.It makes sense more people eat beef here.I want to be good for the environment but it is not easy for me to reduce the footprint. I think I’m already trying my best. I’d love to share your ideas or opinions. Please let me know if you have suggestion! By Sachiko Miyakawa
Filed under: Society + Media | Tags: earth, eco-friendly, ecological, footprint, map, misconceptions, planet, quiz, recycle, waste, world, worldmapper
When I first started recycling I was thrilled to discover that nearly everything came in a container that had the little recycle symbol with a number on the bottom. I thought to myself, “Yeah, I’m going to recycle everything!” and so I rinsed and sorted all my recyclables and eagerly awaited the day that I would have enough to justify a trip to one of the drop sites around town.
When the day finally came, I went online and did a quick search to find out where I should take my recyclables and where I could get cash for my aluminum and tin cans. As I read through the list again and again searching for #5 and #7 plastics, my heart sank. Nobody in town accepted these plastics. How could this be? Each container had the recycle symbol on it – doesn’t that mean it’s recyclable? My misconceptions about recycling became very apparent to me that day and I wondered how many others had experienced this same disappointment.
Armed with more information, a weary eye to increasing consumerism and a skyrocketing world population, I thought I was savvier than the average environista. I now know to expect this to be proven untrue, sometimes on a daily basis. The day I took the Ecological Footprint Quiz was no exception.
It turns out that despite recycling, riding my bike to work, blowing paychecks on energy efficient light bulbs, loving organic milk, and occasionally digging through my roommates trash to pick out the bottles and cans it would still take 3.6 planets to sustain us if everyone lived like me. Can this be true? I’m willing to admit that I might not be as green as I would like to be, but it’s hard to believe that my ecological footprint is the equivalent of 16 acres. But then again, I do rent a room in one of the least efficient homes in Lawrence, have a penchant for meat products, and spend many hours in airplanes satisfying my lust for travel.
Perhaps this is my one and only time to feel proud about being “below average.” It’s easy to pat myself on the back for recycling and making small eco-friendly changes. However, it turns out these are only Band-Aids on a much bigger problem.
(Foot)note of the day: David Beckham has the biggest carbon footprint in the world
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~SARAH H
The most striking score I received in the Ecological Footprint Quiz was on the section of mobility, a score of 0.
I chose to live in a house that is equally distant from downtown and campus. In a city the size of Lawrence, this makes riding a bike to either destination fairly short and manageable (unfortunately, riding up Mount Oread doesn’t get any easier). Working on campus helps reduce travel distances as well. Some destinations are simply out of the bounds of a normal bike ride, but reducing the ecological impact of these trips is still possible. My trips to the grocery store, for instance, are usually in the company of another who owns a fuel efficient Prius.
I also have the bizarre condition of never having flown on a plane, which helped my score. At some point, this condition will be resolved and I will get on a plane, a plane that will take me to a much larger city. In these cities, transportation will be much different. I will still want to reduce my ecological footprint, but I probably won’t be riding a bike or walking across the city. That will be done by means of public transportation, an ecologically sensible solution for places of dense population. In suburban areas, areas built with the mobility of the car in mind, it is the most difficult to reduce our ecological footprint. This is and will be the challenge of urban developers.
All said, it really is easy, in a city this size, to reduce our ecological footprint in regards to mobility.
Bobby Grace
My roommate’s idea of recycling is wearing her brother’s old T-ball shirts. Her responses to my pleas to turn off the light when she leaves a room (and leaves the apartment) ranges from an eye-roll and unconvincing head nod to “but I was going to go right back” which I’ve learned to mean within the next week. Next to this you can understand that it’s easy to feel ecologically noble. I need little more than my desk-side paper-only bin and reusable water bottle to forge the soapbox upon which I stand to address her wasteful ways. Relatively speaking, I’m a green machine. Even so, when I sat down to take the Ecological Footprint Quiz, I had an idea that my footprint would likely be larger than I would like to admit. There are a number of materials that I excuse myself from recycling in the name of saving space in the apartment and I look forward to a super hot shower after an afternoon jog that I can’t promise I always hurry through. However, the quiz didn’t expose either of these hypocrisies. It instead isolated a few that I had yet to acknowledge myself. How much fuel am I claiming in order to drive 35 minutes to my job and my boyfriend? How little attention do I pay to where my food comes from if a SALE sign obscures my concern? Where does my environmental concern end and my pocketbook and personal indulgences begin? This of course leads to the far more complicated question of where should I begin to narrow the divide? What sacrifices ought to be made? Perhaps most alarmingly, my footprint is 25% smaller than the average person in the U.S. —what about the uberwasters? How big is their print?
-Sonya English
The eco footprint quiz is great for raising awareness, and there’s an extended section on taking action based on your results. It also oversimplifies and doesn’t allow you to give nuanced answers. For example, I eat meat once or twice a week, but strive to eat non-CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) meat and eggs, which are often from local, pasture-raised animals. In our house, we compost, we seek out thrift store deals and Dumpster-diving finds, we walk to work (uphill, both ways, in the snow, of course!). We live on local food to the extent that we can in Kansas. Alas, it would take 16 acres to support this lifestyle, which tells me that for all the actions I think make a difference, I still live in a single-family home, drive a fuel-inefficient light pickup, and take the occasional plane trip. And there’s that omnivore’s dilemma.
The added benefit of taking the quiz was it prompted dinner-table talk about the future goals for our household. We are easing into a test year now to determine how much food it takes for us to live on — and how much we want to “live” — as we look toward starting an organic, sustainable farm operation in the Kaw Valley. We hope to come as close as we can to living on what we raise and preserve ourselves, with exceptions for what we cannot for cost or climate reasons. But there are trade-offs for everything. The 50 lb. bag of organic rice we recently purchased traveled from halfway around the globe, gobbling up energy and resources all the way. If it lasts all year, does that ecologically balance out? I don’t know.
- posted by Jen Humphrey
