How big is your enviro footprint? Check and find out

I am skeptical about concept faddism. Issue fads are cheap, easy, and so often untrue, and that is one of the reasons people glom onto them, adjust their lives according to them – or pretend they do – and turn them into tiresome, and ultimately meaningless clichés.

One problem with this, however, is that such stimuli to the popular imagination aren’t always untrue, and that elements of them at least might well be true and we could ultimately rue the fact they were used and abused and ultimately relegated to fad status, forcing the more cynical members of the population to ignore them in their entirety, rather than just in the parts that should be ignored.

Popular fad of the moment is that the human race has done and continues to do such a hatchet-job on the environment that eventually dear old Mother Earth is just going to vomit and eliminate all of us. As the doomsayers would have it, we are drinking all the potable water, killing all the fish, cutting down all the forests and just basically paving paradise and putting up parking lots all over the place.

Our collective greed – especially in the (held to be) craven Western World, demands that we all drive Hummers, spew out hydrocarbons and poop in the oceans whenever the need strikes us, and to hell with all the rest of the planet, because they can all damn well starve, which they already seem to be doing a good job of in some places. In this we flagellate ourselves thoroughly for our greed, but don’t do much about pointing collective fingers at, oh, say, China, that defiles the environment more than the rest of us put together and has no intention of rectifying their behavior in that regard. We don’t say much because we we really like to trade with the Chinese.

Anyway, all of the above is what we are led to believe, and we’re told to feel very, very bad. Maybe not bad enough to actually get rid of that Hummer, but bad, nevertheless.

At the same time, governments are already picking up on the buzzwords and they are relying on our collective guilt to grant them permission to mount a few great big tax grabs the like of which we have never seen before, all in the name of the environment.

OK, a few points about this. Just because the environment has become a faddish concern doesn’t mean for a second there isn’t peril afoot on the planet, Maybe our hydrocarbon emissions aren’t responsible for climate change, but maybe they don’t help much. If they have a role, then it is better that we make some changes. I don’t necessarily place myself on that global warming bandwagon, but I have lived long enough to know that the climate has changed from the time of my childhood, and it seems to be continuing to change. Have I had a role in this? I don’t know. But, if I can do something to rectify some of my wastefulness, I am happy to do so.

As it is, my wife and I don’t live particularly high on the hog. We drive fuel-efficient vehicles, we recycle steadfastly, we grow some of our own vegetables, and we don’t leave lights burning in rooms we’re not using. Small potatoes (just like the ones we tend to grow) to be sure, but every little bit helps.

Anyway, want to know what sort of impression you make on the planet; what your points are in terms of your impact on this old sod? Then check this out and find out how big is your ecological footprint. At the very least, it’s kind of interesting. So, pay a call to http://www.myfootprint.org/ and take the quiz. By the way, the parts of the quiz are metric, so you’ll have to do some converting, but it’s not a big deal.

My footprint is 7.8 hectares. That’s below the average for North America, but if everybody on earth had a footprint even that size, we’d easily run out of planet.

What size is your footprint?