That's Going to Leave a Mark!

One of the largest impacts on the environment continues to remain invisible. What damages the world more than it might seem to are the collective habits that society follows daily. 

By: Jamie

Although strange to grasp, everyday human activities such as driving a car or buying steak from the market influences the environment… and unfortunately not in the best ways. These simple actions seem small to the majority, but it is in fact contributing to a much larger problem, a problem that starts with wasting electricity and domino effects into global warming. Luckily, there are ways to track this footprint and determine ways to reduce it.

What is an Ecological Footprint?

The word “ecological” is a form of ecology, which is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and the physical environment that surrounds them. The second-word “footprint” refers to the impression left on an area. Bridging this phrase together creates the final definition of an Ecological Footprint: the ways that humans affect the physical environment and living organisms around them. Simply, Ecological Footprints are what people take from nature.  

There are many types of environments, but this topic refers simply to the influence natural and manmade environments have on one another. Natural environments relate to the world untouched by humans, such as water, air, land, and light. They provide habitats to living organisms. Humans heavily depend on natural environments, as they require resources (source of supply or aid) to create their own homes. Manmade environments involve permanent human settlements like villages, cities, and towns. While current advances in technology in manmade environments are beneficial (helpful) to humans, they come at great costs. This is where the purpose of Ecological Footprints and the effects that humans have on the environment come into play.

A common issue that environmental activists (people who persuade others to help them in their cause) state are how the resources that humans are using to produce goods and services have had detrimental (harmful) effects on the environment. Due to a lack of balance caused by human disturbances, the ecosystem (a community of interacting organisms and their physical environment) experiences a disruption known as an ecological imbalance. Note that the definition for an “ecosystem” is similar to “ecology” as they both share the prefix “eco”, meaning habit or environment. For example, as more companies choose to cut down trees to create paper for books, the living organisms that depended on those trees lose access to necessities like shelter, protection, and air. It might have started with a single tree, but attempts to increase the number of cut trees in a shorter amount of time have resulted in an ecological imbalance. As resources from other areas shrunk, these paper companies have now resorted to the mass cutting of entire forests, a process known as deforestation. Many other more complex items suffer from the same processes.

What is the purpose of an Ecological Footprint?

An Ecological Footprint is a tool that governments, businesses, and educational institutions use to answer a specific resource question: How much of the biological capacity of a planet is required by given human activity or population? A simple alternative question is: How much nature does Earth have, and how much do humans use? People also measure the environment through carbon footprints, which refer to the quantities of carbon dioxide emissions associated with an activity, process, or product. This is different from Ecological Footprints which take six categories of productive surface areas into account; cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, forest area, and carbon demand. 

Ecological Footprints are measured through units called global hectares (gha). Global 

hectares account for the average productivity of all the biologically (relating to living organisms and processes) productive land and sea areas in the world in a given year. To break this down, know that the definition of a hectare is a unit of area equal to 10,000 square meters (107,639 square feet). A global hectare takes this unit and places it on a larger scale. Take the Global Footprint Network’s 2019 statistics of the estimated 12.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water on Earth and divide it by the world’s population of 7.7 billion people. This results in about 1.6 global hectares per person. 

So what does this mean for the environment?

All humans have Ecological Footprints. Unlike normal footprints, like the imprints created from running on the sand at the beach, each individual’s Ecological Footprint is invisible. It can only be recognized through its long term effects on the environment. As technology has advanced and society has found new energy sources and ways to create products, the human population’s ecological footprint has grown tremendously. This is not a positive thing. As the Ecological Footprint for a person, country, etc. grows, the environment decreases in resources and diversity. 

The unit of global hectares takes the total of different types of production, weighted by the richness of the land used, and divides the number of hectares used. However, making the best use of the resources available and maintaining the balance between the natural and manmade environments are two separate things. Many people tend to exceed the number of global hectares that each person is estimated to have. The United Arab Emirates has the highest Ecological Footprint with an average of 10.68 gha per person. With the estimated number of 7.8 billion people on Earth now in 2020, it would take approximately seven more Earths for each person to live like the Emirati people. 

What can I do to reduce my Ecological Footprint?

There are many easy ways to reduce your Ecological Footprint, whether it be minor adjustments to a daily routine or taking steps to completely remove bad habits. Renee Cho from Columbia University created a list of some of these actions to consider partaking in:

• Plan meals ahead of time, and freeze leftovers to eat later. This reduces the food waste that many people disregard. If there is still lots of food waste left, use the scraps for composting. Composting supports plant growth and healthy soil.   

• Eat more fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans. Livestock like meat and dairy are harmful to the environment. Processing the methane that beef and sheep belch out contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, an air pollutant. Consider going vegetarian for a week and support eating low on the food chain.  

• Choose organic and local foods in season to eat. The transportation of foods from far away requires the use of a truck, ship, plane, train, etc. which uses fossil fuels that pollute the air. 

• Buy vintage or recycled clothing and avoid fast fashion, which wastes large amounts of clothing. Fashion is one of the largest polluting industries in the world. After a trend dies, these pieces are thrown out to landfills where they produce methane. 

• Wash your clothing with cold water. The enzymes in cold water are designed to better clean clothing in comparison to hot water. Rather than multiple loads, two loads of laundry in cold water weekly will save carbon dioxide.

• Bring a recycled bag while shopping. Use a reusable water bottle. Over 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year, making 10 percent of the ocean plastic. Reducing the use of one-use, disposable plastic will prove to be an immense help to the environment. 

• Reduce excessive power usage. Turn off lights after leaving the room and unplug electronic devices when they are not in use. 

• Reduce excessive water usage. Many people fall in the habit of running the water while brushing their teeth or scrubbing their hands. An average amount of two gallons fall from a faucet every minute. This small act of turning off the faucet while it is not in use will save up to three to four gallons a day.  

Ecological Footprint Calculator provides an estimate of each person’s Ecological Footprint after answering a few questions about energy and resource consumption. It then gives each individual the number of Earths it would take to sustain the entire world’s population if they lived the same as they did. Once taking the test, comment down below your results! Would all 7.8 billion humans on Earth be able to survive on one planet?