What is my footprint?

Before I started talking about living a sustainable life style, I thought it prudent to find out what is my family's ecological footprint.   The task can be relative easy, or a bit hard, depending on what metrics you choose to use.  Here is a summary of my research starting from the two main sources I used, and including a few more that might be of interest:

www.ecofoot.org - This site offers a simple way to calculate your carbon footprint.   If everyone lived like me, we would need 3.6 Planet Earths to provide enough resources.  Yikes!  It is not going to be easy to reduce that to 1 - yet I feel I must.  How else can I call myself a sustainability advocate?  I have started to take steps, very small steps, so keep tuned and I will try to post on what these are.

www.MIPandL.org - The Massachusetts Interfaith Power and Light offers a personal carbon calculator in the form of an Excel Spreadsheet.   It is focused on homeowners and households, requiring input on actual utility usage as a basis for calculating a typical household's carbon footprint.  In our case, it is 53,393 CO2 lbs/year (54,600 is  typical for US household).  Obviously we have a long way to go. 

www.empowermentinstitute.net - This is a terrific organization which I believe provided the basis for the MIPandL calculator.  Its Low Carbon Diet program is based on sound social marketing principles and I believe Amherst and Northampton will make steps this fall to organize home owners in a community effort to support each other in reducing emissions.

Here are some more links that you might find useful.  I particularly enjoyed following the Slate and Treehugger challenge:

The EPA Personal emissions calculator:  www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html

Conservation International: ecofootprint  (my last score was 76) www.conservation.org/act/live_green/Pages/ecofootprint.aspx

Slate Green Challenge:  www.slate.com/id/216414/

Be Green: www.begreennow.com/calculator (gives the option to save your calculations)

Why calculate your footprint?  Because you cannot understand what you cannot measure on your own terms.   Because learning is the basis for effectiveness and we all need to continuously learn in order to become better connected to our planet as well as to ourselves.  We need to apply our will and the precious moments of consciousness we have each day to the task of understanding our own role in Earth's ecological cycle.

Introduction: Green Web Weaver

A web is so many things - a gossamer creation by Arachne, a structured veil that holds or frames, an interconnecting network, or a field of  flexible, tensile strength.  My craft is architecture and my vision is of a sustainable world.   Normally I shy from public expression, yet here I am, putting words on a page that can seen by anyone.  This is perhaps because the need I feel to reach out is great.   

Our civilization has built an enormous web of unsustainable institutions and practices - our consumption of life supporting resources is rising, while our life supporting resources are declining.  The impacts of our lifestyle on Earth are becoming self evident:  climate disturbance, species extinction, mineral and resource depletion, ozone depletion, air and water pollution, scarcity and unreliability of rain fall, depletion of soil quality.

In the face of this harsh reality I feel compelled to add my voice to those of millions of others who seek for ways to change their behavior and their environment, in order to start cleaning this grey web of pollution that we have woven, so that the sun can shine through.  Together with my friends and family, it is a green web that I want to weave.

So thanks to Cat, who gave me the tools to start weaving, and to Weavers, who support my fledgling efforts, I shall spin some threads that might slowly construct a web of green thoughts, intentions, and actions.

Melusina