Natasha D'Souza

We in the developed world have always prided ourselves in our technology to accomplish tasks faster, easier and with minimal manual labour. Manual labour was for the developing world. The recent focus on green house gases has now made us re-evaluate our use of technology in our daily life. Words like environmental/ecological footprint have been added to our vocabulary.

An ecological footprint is a number that represents the human demand on the earth’s ecosystem and natural resources. At current rates of resource consumption, we need at least 2 more planet earths to sustain our North American lifestyles.
The Royal Saskatchewan Museum has an Ecological Footprint calculator. This does have a bias towards city living and the calculator is based on the choices we make around food, goods, services, shelter and mobility.

It goes through a series of multiple choice questions and gives you a number at the end which is your footprint. The average Canadian footpring is 6.9 hectares the size of two football fields. By clicking around on the icons you can see how the numbers change, thus how you can lower your number.

Here are some more calculators

• Earth Day
• Global Footprint Network
• My footprint

So what is your ecological footprint?