People impact the environment and our planet in many ways; understanding this goes beyond simple counts of how many people there are on the planet or in a given country.
If we truly want to live sustainably for generations to come, one needs to consider the environmental impact our lifestyle choices have on the Earth and its ecosystems. This becomes very important because each of us need and depends on many natural resources (e.g. air, water, land, minerals) to live, yet ironically, we continue our activities that reduce or damage these critical resources we need thereby making them unavailable in the future.
Being curious I took the ecological footprint quiz today to explore the amount of the earth's land, water and other resources required to produce the goods and services used by an average person in a particular country. After completion of the questions, the footprint calculated that everybody would need 4.8 Earths if everyone were to live like me.
My problem lays around the fact that I use up a lot of services (updating my cell phone and computer when it becomes outdated, riding in a car instead of taking the bus, etc.). The best feature about studying this human influences on the environment is it involves examining the way we use resources versus the availability of this resources over the long-term. On the flip side if we know and understand how we use resources, we can take steps and make adjustments to ensure that the resources we depend on will be available to us and for generations to come.
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