Ecological Footprints

William E. Rees and his students at the University of British Columbia developed a quantitative tool to measure sustainability, or the environmental efficiency of a population. An ecological footprint analysis measures “the total area of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems required, on an ongoing basis, to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on earth those ecosystems are located.” For example, the “ecological footprint” for an impoverished village town would be significantly smaller (half hectare average) than that of a larger, wealthier city such as Tokyo, which incredibly, has one the size of 142 million hectares. Large Metropolitan cities like Tokyo house millions of people, and many who live there physically are unaware that they do not live there “ecologically”. What this means is that they rely on the ecosystems of other towns, cities and countries for support and sustenance. Small towns and large cities, the world is connected in many direct and indirect ways. The pollution in a small China factory town can be a related to excessive consumption in Beijing, or even cities outside the country, such as London, New York, Vancouver, and even Baton Rouge.

Some of the statistics I found in an article Rees wrote in Briarpatch Magazine were astonishing. If the disparity between the footprints of a poor small town and a large city were not startling enough, the population growth by 2030 are. It is projected that by that time, the world will have grown by 2.2 billion people, a number greater than the world population in the 1930s! And so Rees asks, “How sustainable is city living?” Or, how sustainable will the earth be in 2030, with 2 billion more people on it? Rees’ ecological footprint analysis aims to account for sustainability in a society that is continuing to grow in number and advancing technologically, both in exponential rates. As a society, we should be aware of how we are connected, socially, culturally environmentally and economically to the rest of the world. We should be aware of our individual “footprints”, and the one we leave on the earth for future generations to follow. These "footprints" can provide people with an “ethical directive” and an understanding of Rees’ belief that “no lifestyle is sustainable if it could not safely be shared by all members of the human family.”