Dwayne wrote:
<quote> So what you're saying, magic footprint calculator, is ... that it would still take more Earths than we currently have to support my not terribly extravagant (by Western standards) "lifestyle"? ... So the question is, what would it take to get the meter down to one Earth? .... As with all software, the results manifest programmatically encapsulated assumptions. It's those assumptions I'm now eager to dissect like a middle school lab worm. <unquote>
Dwayne, I wish you would dissect the ecological footprint calculations, because as far as I can see, they have almost no relationship to reality. Most take the calculations of the Global Footprint Network as their source (www.footprintnetwork.org).
Global footprint network make the extraordinary proposition that the world's own ecological footprint is bigger than the world. But that only calls into question what kind of calculation the 'ecological footprint' actually is.
The original idea of the global footprint was that it was the area of land that was needed to produce the resources to live on. But the actual area that people farm and develop is quite a small part of the land surface of the world. There are 13 billion hectares of land in the world, 0.2 per cent is built up, and twenty per cent is farm land (it is true that the additional 24 per cent of forest land is in part also resource for us, but most of it is not).
So if the world's actual footprint is, let's say, one quarter of the total land area, that would be 3.25 billion hectares.
300 million Americans with an ecological footprint of 6 hectares each have already taken 1,800,000,000 hectares of that.
830 million Europeans with an ecological footprint of 5 hectares each take another 4,150,000,000, and we are already at an ecological footprint of nearly six billion hectares - before we even add in the Chinese, Indians, South Americans, Indonesians, Africans and so on.
So riddle me this? Why is the actual land area farmed and developed less than half the size of the 'ecological footprint'? In fact, the land area that the world's population actually uses has been shrinking since 1981, as cropland has reduced (because of higher yields).
Wouldn't you expect the actual area harvested to grow as the 'ecological footprint' grows? How is it that the calculation tells us we need more land to feed our consumer society, but the actual land area we use is shrinking?
The answer has to be that the calculation is wrong.