h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Our actions in the present determine the conditions for what the future will bring.


"Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity..."

Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy
Mathis Wackernagel et al
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Vol. 99, Issue 14, 9266-9271, July 9, 2002


"... the environment is still at the periphery of socio-economic development. Poverty and excessive consumption — the twin evils of humankind that were highlighted in the previous two GEO reports — continue to put enormous pressure on the environment. The unfortunate result is that sustainable development remains largely theoretical for the majority of the world’s population of more than 6 000 million people. The level of awareness and action has not been commensurate with the state of the global environment today; it continues to deteriorate."

United Nations Environment Programme,
Global Environment Outlook 3
2002


"The EF [Ecological Footprint] of the world average consumer in 1999 was 2.3 hectares per person, or 20% above the earth's biological capacity of 1.90 hectares per person. In other words, humanity now exceeds the planet's capacity to sustain its consumption of renewable resources."
WWF, Living Planet Report 2002


The BBC has a useful quiz for determining your own Ecological Footprint; it is at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2002/disposable_planet/quiz/

I found this particularly useful because it has only a few questions so you can toy with different scenarios and discover appropriate changes of lifestyle that you can make to reduce your ecological impact.


Then perhaps we can be sure of securing a future for our children.

I think there will be tight regulations of daily life in order to reduce the ecological footprint. If they will be democratic or not, that is another question...

The footprint questionnaire was interesting (apart from my not knowing the square metreage of my house and my mpg in litres!). I thought I would do fairly well, and if everyone lived like me, we would need an earth and a half!

Scary, isn't it. Do you eat meat? Try switching to vegetarian or vegan and see what a massive impact that has ...

Thats a bit tricky- I have come across the vegetarians need less land argument before, but its based on a false assumption.
That is, that all of the land now used for livestock grazing would be used for crops. This is often neither possible or desireable - the Welsh hills would not be so grassy, for instance, destroying an ecosystem that took thousands of years to establish, without considering that people would have to live there to farm it.
I would be first to say that factory farming is a bad thing, but meat is a valid product of land which cannot be used for other things.