Awareness: Ecological footprinting and the current reality

*from The WorldWatch Institute; State of the World 2004: Consumption By the Num

Since measuring one's ecological footprint is very much about consumption, a logical place to look for the current state of the world, is the WorldWatch State of the World Report for 2004 which centered on the consumer society. Some brief highlights:

• The global consumer class (users of televisions, telephones, and the Internet) totals some 1.7 billion people —more than a quarter of the world
• Nearly half of global consumers now live in developing countries, including 240 million in China and 120 million in India
• even as per person consumption expands, the absolute number of people also continues to grow—close to 3 billion human beings are likely to be added by mid-century.
• Some 41 million passenger vehicles were produced in 2002, five times as many as in 1950. The global passenger car fleet is growing by about 11 million vehicles annually.
• Auto sales in China alone increased by 60 percent in 2002 and by more than 80 percent in the first half of 2003. By 2015, if growth continues apace, industry analysts expect 150 million cars to be jamming China’s streets—18 million more than were driven on U.S. streets and highways in 1999.
• Consumers across the globe now spend an estimated $35 billion a year on bottled water.
• In 2000, one in five people in the developing world—1.1 billion total—did not have “reasonable access“ to safe drinking water.
• In 1999, some 2.8 billion people—two in every five humans on the planet—lived on less than $2 a day.
• 2.4 billion people worldwide—two out of every five—live without basic sanitation.
• Providing adequate food, clean water, and basic education for the world's poorest could all be achieved for less than people spend annually on makeup, ice cream, and pet food. (come back tommorrow to see this table)

It's clear that population growth is a major problem in terms of the earth's ability to support human society, but often we focus solely on the raw per-head population counts of developing nations. It is helpful to keep in mind a population measurement I learned from Manfred Max-Neef, which, instead of counting one Chinese and one American as two equal people, instead counts each person based on how much of the ecosystems resources they use (similar to ecological footprinting). Max-neef calls this new hypothetical person an "ecoson" (ecological person).

When counting population by ecoson, it becomes clear that the areas which are actually "overpopulated" are not China and India, but rather the developed world, where our consumption far outstrips the earth's ability to sustain. This is not to say that China or India are not also "overpopulated". They are... in the sense that "overpopulated" means that there is a larger population than the ecosystem can support. What too often is forgotten however, is that if we in Japan, US, or Europe actually depended on our local ecosystem to provide the same amount of resources we currently consume, we are way more overpopulated than China and India. We are lucky enough however, to be able to use their resources as well... in a sense, our overpopulation seems to exacerbate the problems of their overpopulation.

That being said, much of what the bullet points above, as well as the WorldWatch book, illustrates is that the population in terms of ecoson is quickly rising in the developing world as well. If we were to equally divide the usable area of the earth among all the people of the earth, we would have to meet our individual needs with 1.9 hectares (4.7 acres) of land. Considering that the current world average is already 2.3 hectares -and growing, and that if everyone on earth consumed as much as the average American we would require four earths, (only a few less earths if we only consumed as much as the average European).

The question that no one can answer -not even the most optimistic scientists and futurists, (well, that's not true... science fiction writers have lots of ideas) is, where will the extra resources come from? Attempts to replicate working ecosystems have only served to illustrate just how complex our world is. Why do I bring this up? Just to point out that there is currently no realistic scenario on the horizon that would allow us to live in space stations (as I often hear people (who read science fiction books watch science fiction movies) say will "probably" happen when faced with the truth of our current over-consumption)

And, if you haven't noticed, everything I have written so far has been pretty human-centric. I haven't even mentioned the needs of other living creatures to get their fair share of the earth's resources. As WorldChanging's Alex Steffen points out in his must-read essay (though I don't agree with it all), Winning the Great Wager

[W]e're already using between 40 and 50% of the world's "net primary productivity." What that means, for those of us whom math makes sleepy, is that humans are using about half of all the life on earth – that about half of all the plants, insects, microbes and mammals alive on the earth are being sucked into the systems that go to feed our needs. Think of every living thing on the planet as a river. We're diverting half of that river to suit our needs, already.

[W]hile we're busy sucking up all that "net primary productivity," there are a whole mess of other critters -- from salmon to tigers to little bacteria and beetles we're never heard of because they remain undiscovered by science -- that can't get what they need. Clearcuts; overgrazed grasslands; eroding farmlands; fishing boats strip-mining the sea; huge toxic plumes in the air and water, radiating out from our cities: our current over-use of nature is driving species extinct all around us.

Unfortunately, I could go on and on filling pages with statistics and facts documenting the unsustainable state of our consumption. I'll stop here though. And just to be clear, I don't think that spouting all these depressing facts and figures does any good to convince anyone, or change anyone's mind who doesn't already believe that our current lifestyle is no sustainable. These figures do, however, help me to keep things in perspective. They are not so much shocking me into reality, as they are acting as grounding points. being surrounded every day by a society that refuses to acknowledge the reality, it is helpful to come back and review these so I don't get swept up in the denial.

Next time, I move on to "awareness" of some possible (not prescribed) moral and ethical reasons that one might want to pay attention to their ecological footprint.