MAE 124/ESYS
103:
Week 1 Assignment
How Green Are
You? Computing Your
Ecological Footprint
The week 1 homework is focused on ecological footprints. Your instructions are
to first compute your ecological footprint using either
the Redefining Progress website
or the Global Footprint Network website.
For further perspective on ecological footprints,
please also also read the commentary Ecological Footprint
2.0 by Alex Lowe
Second answer the following questions briefly (no more than 200 words total).
- What is your ecological footprint in acres? How many Earth's does the
ecological footprint quiz say would be required if everyone on the planet
lived as you do?
- How is the footprint partitioned between food, shelter/housing, goods & services,
and transportation/mobility/carbon? (The different footprint quizzes report these
numbers slightly differently, but these categories are intended to work for both.)
- Mobility/Transportation/Carbon:
- Food:
- Shelter/Housing:
- Goods/Services:
- What factors contribute most to your footprint? What actions would reduce
your footprint?
Bring a hard copy of your responses to discussion section to share with
the class, and come to section prepared to talk about what you've learned.
Please also submit your written responses via turnitin.com, so that the grader can access them.
Detailed
instructions for turnitin.com are available here.
If you're curious, you may want to check out alternate ecological
footprint calculators. You are welcome to test out both the suggested
websites, or you may want to look at
Carbon Footprint.
And if you hunt around, perhaps you'll find other ecological footprint
calculators as well. Let us know....
There's also plenty of commentary about footprints on the
web:
- WWF: http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/
- Best Foot Forward (professional ecological footprint accounting
tools): http://www.bestfootforward.com/
- Carbon Footprint, Ltd.: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/index.html
- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
- web commentary:
http://pthbb.org/natural/footprint/
- Living
Planet Report 2008, from http://www.footprintnetwork.org
- Knudson,
2003, State of Denial, Sacramento Bee, 27 April 2003.
- Wackernagel et al,
2002, Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy, Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci., 99, 9266-9271.
Water is also a big environmental issue, especially in Southern California,
so you might find it interesting to compute your water footprint as well
using the
H2O Conserve web site
For further perspective on water, you can read about virtual water from
the website of the International Year of Fresh Water
An alternative water footprint calculator is available from the
Water Footprint Network web site.