MAE 124/ESYS
103:
Week 1 Assignment
How Green Are
You? Computing Your
Ecological Footprint
The week
1 homework asks you to compute your ecological footprint using the Redefining Progress website
or the Global Footprint Network website.
For further perspective on ecological footprints,
please also read the commentary Ecological Footprint
2.0 by Alex Lowe
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.