In relation to the idea of building a sustainable society, we must look at the reality today which is so unsustainable that there is a general confusion about where to start.
While some say that the planet can sustain food production for another 3 billion through improved practices, the reality is that we have already penetrated deeply into the ecological core that the planet needs in order to sustain the balance of life as it now exists. This relates to the idea of Carrying Capacity which was popularized by the ecologist Paul Elhrich in the 1960s and refers to the ability of the ecosystem to sustain a given population of organisms with the whole system in balance.
The ecological footprint represents an attempt to measure the amount of biologically productive land and water an individual, a city, a country or all of humanity requires for the resources it consumes and to absorb its waste, using prevailing technology. As the economy has grown exponentially in the massive development process called modern industrialization so has the ecological footprint of humanity – it has increased 2.5 fold since 1961.
In the WWF's Living Planet Report 2004 it is noted that our energy footprint is dominated by the use of fossils fuels such as coal, gas and oil "particularly alarming." This is the fastest growing component of the ecological footprint, increasing by nearly 700 percent in the 40 years between 1961 and 2001. WWF warns that the overexploitation of these fuels is putting "the whole of humanity under threat from climate change." The antidote is found in renewable energies and promote energy efficient technologies, buildings and transport systems, the organization says.
Nowhere is this overconsumption more acute than in the United States and Canada. The ecological footprint of an average North American is not only double that of a Europe but seven times that of the average Asian or African.
Pressure on the Earth's resources will only increase as the Asian and African regions develop and consume more.
"Sustainable living and a high quality of life are not incompatible," said Jonathan Loh, one of the authors of the WWF report. "However we need to stop wasting natural resources and to redress the imbalance in consumption between the developing and industrialized worlds."
Recent scientific studies continue to warn that humanity's demands on natural resources are reaching, or have already hit, unsustainable levels. Redefining Progress Sustainability Program Director Mathis Wackernagel measured "ecological footprint" over the past 40 years. ("Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy" 6/27/02). "Sustainability requires living with the regenerative capacity of the biosphere," he says. The ecological footprint is a way to measure our escalating consumption of "natural capital" and to contrast this need to consume more of the earth's resources at an exponential rate, with the limitations of the planet to sustain those needs. He adds that the ecological footprint functions as a yardstick for “measuring the ecological bottom line of sustainability..." Humanity:
Used 70% of the Earth's regenerative capacity in 1961
Reached parity in the mid-1970s (spend as much as nature saves in terms of natural capital)
Demand has exceeded replenishment ability by at least 25% since 1999 (deficit spending, we spend more natural capital than nature creates).
It now takes the biosphere, a year and three months to renew what humanity uses in a single year.
The ecological footprint for humanity may exceed the biological capacity of the planet by over 25 percent. As we have disturbed that natural balance of things it is probable that we have reduced this biological capacity to a significant degree (Redefining Progress "What we use and what we have: Ecological Footprint and Carrying Capacity" http://www.rprogress.org/progsum/nip/ef/ef_projsum.htm).
Number of acres of biological productive land per person (From Our Ecological Footprints, 1996)
Now if you divide the amount of biologically productive land by the number of people on this planet and what they on average consume, you get 5.5 acres per person. That is less than half the number that the relatively "frugal" Europeans consume, but is 75 percent less than what the relatively wasteful American economies consume.
Since natural capital is being consumed faster than it is being produced, the economy is growing through deficit spending, that 5.5 acres per person does not include the rest of the 30 million species that co-inhabit this planet with us, based on the current economic math, there is nothing left for them? Since they do not directly contribute value to the economy.
Urban Footprints
London consumes annually (according to Herbert Giradet, a professor at Middlesex University in London):
110 supertanker loads of oil
1.2 million tons of lumber
1.2 million tons of metal
2 million tons each of food, plastic and paper
1 billion tons of water
And produces:
15 million tons of rubbish
7.5 million tons of sewage
7.5 million tons of CO2
London covers just 450,000 acres, but it requires nearly 50 million acres (58 times its land area) for its resource, and waste absorption needs. London though having only 12 percent of the UK's population requires an area equal to all of the UK in productive land just to service it. Of course these productive lands stretch across the world, due to innovations that have allowed the global economy (Richard Rogers Cities for a Small World 111). Meeting the needs of everyone in the world in the same way that the needs of Londoners are met would require at least three more Earths (Molly O'Meara Reinventing Cities for People and the Planet World Watch 1999).
The metro area of Vancouver, with 1.6 million inhabitants and a land area of 2930 km2 has an ecological footprint of 6,720,000 ha, 23 times its geographic area, or 3 times their fair “earthshare.”
Consumption of wood, paper, fiber, and food (including seafood) by the inhabitants of 29 cities in the Baltic Sea drainage basin appropriates an ecosystem area 200 times larger that the area of the cities themselves.
Transportation Footprints
Cars require 16,000 sq. ft. of land per passenger
Buses 3,200 sq. ft. per passenger
Bicycles 1,300 sq. ft. per rider
National Footprints
Netherlands with an area of 33,920 sq km requires over 15 times its land mass to sustain its society 100,000 to 140,000 km2 of agricultural land, mostly from the third world, for food production.” Much of which is used to produce value-added food products produced in the Netherlands for export, such as imported gains that are fed to domestic livestock.
Despite small size, few natural resources, and relatively large populations, both Holland and Japan enjoy high material standards and positive current account and trade balances as measured in monetary terms. These countries are promoted to the world as economic success stories, examples for the developing world to follow. Most other so-called "advanced" economies are running massive, unaccounted, ecological deficits with the rest of the planet. Europe and Japan could not sustain their economies if they were forced to rely on domestic supplies of natural resources.
Canada despite its high level of per capita consumption runs an ecological surplus because of its low land area to population ratio. While it is one of the few countries running an ecological surplus it is exporting those surpluses to countries that are running deficits to sustain their economies.
Ecological deficits are a measure of the entropic load and resultant "disordering" being imposed on the ecosphere by so-called advanced countries as the unaccounted cost of maintaining and further expanding their wealthy consumer economies. This massive entropic imbalance invokes what might be called the first axiom of ecological footprint analysis: On a finite planet, not all countries or regions can be net importers of carrying capacity. This, in turn, has serious implications for global development trends (William E. Rees Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 17, Number 3, January 1996).
Conventional wisdom suggests that because of technology and trade, human carrying capacity is infinitely expandable and therefore virtually irrelevant to economic and social considerations. By contrast, this site argues that ecological carrying capacity remains the fundamental basis for economic accounting. A fundamental question for ecological economics is whether remaining stocks of natural capital are adequate to sustain the anticipated load of the human economy into the next century. Since mainstream (neoclassical) models are blind to ecological structure and function, they cannot even properly address this question. The present article therefore assesses the capital stocks, physical flows, and corresponding ecosystems areas required to support the economy using "ecological footprint" analysis. This approach shows that most so-called "advanced" countries are running massive unaccounted ecological deficits with the rest of the planet. Since not all countries can be net importers of carrying capacity, the material standards of the wealthy cannot be extended sustainably to even the present world population using prevailing technology. In this light, sustainability may well depend on such measures as greater emphasis on equity in international relationships, significant adjustments to prevailing terms of trade, increasing regional self-reliance, and policies to stimulate a massive increase in the material and energy efficiency of economic activity.
In developing a model for a more sustainable society we have to start with ourselves and the lifestyles we engage in, the buildings we live and work and the neighborhoods, communities, cities, states and nations we live in. We are small in relation to the larger view but by starting small and developing more sustainable ways of living our lives we can be a powerful model for others, demonstrating that we can only do more with less but that we can also live happier more fulfilling lives while consuming less and reducing our ecological footprint. The term ecological footprint is devised as a way to measure our impact on the ecological systems of the planet, with the goal of reducing those impacts, not simply because of sentimental, ethic or moral desire to be frugal, but because of the compelling scientific case that can made in relation to limits to increasing growth and consumption of natural resources.
References:
The Living Planet Report 2004 is online at: http://www.panda.org/livingplanet
Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees Our Ecological Footprint: reducing human impact on the Earth 1996 P106-107