Do You Know What Your Ecological Footprint Is?

With global warming and other ecological issues in the forefront of the news and conversation, the term ecological footprint is often used. Do you know what a ecological footprint is? Do you know what your ecological footprint is?

The ecological footprint is a resource management tool that is used to measure how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its waste under prevailing technology. Every human that lives has an ecological footprint. You should ask yourself how big your footprint is? Are you wasting energy? Are you wasting fuel? Are you polluting the enviroment? Are you careful to recycle? All these are important in determining your ecological footprint.

Footprinting is now widely employed around the globe as a indicator of environmental effiecency. Every action we take impacts the planets ecosystem in some way or another. This really has not been a big concern as long as our use of resources does not exceed what our planet can renew. The big question on the minds of many is are we taking more than we should. This is where ecological footprinting comes in to play.

Currently our ecological footprint is over 23% larger than what the Earth can renew. It now takes over a year and a half the regenerate what we use in a single year. Using the ecological footprint of a population we can measure our overuse, which will help us manage our ecological assests more carefully.

The idea of an ecological footprint was developed by William Reese, a Canadian ecologist in 1992. He believed that finding a yardstick to measure our consumption of the Earth's resources would help illustrate the problems caused by increasing population and the increased consumption that follows. He used data collected all over the world, he showed that at our present rate of consumption could result in a serious global problem in a relatively short time.