Big Foot
Who, me ? OOf, my totally
irritating uncle is here again, on his usual year-end visit to our house. He is a monster.
Every year for 14 days or so, he comes to stay, eats our food, and makes life hell for me.
The whole day he hangs around me, calls me names, and irritates me. Last year, he called
me ‘city joo-joo’. He called me a city joo-joo and started to laugh. I wanted to
kick him back to his fancy US University, Columbia.
| Everywhere people are on the
march. At school and in office. On foot, in cars, to learn and to earn, everybody’s
marching all the time. Either we are all marching towards progress, or we are marching
into the future. Marching for a good life, or a good cause. And as 1998 turns to 1999, we
are all set to march into the next millenium. Left-Right! Forward march! In all this marching, everybody forgets to ask: what kind of
steps are we taking? What are we stepping on? Is it possible we may, in our marching, be
stepping on other people? Trampling them? And, most dangerously, trampling the ecological
biosphere we live in?
As we march on, we never think of the
kind of footprint we may be leaving on the ground we step on. Not the physical one, but
the ecological one. Not the mark we leave as we step on sand, but the one we leave
as we march using up the earth’s natural resources.
Say, what’s your Ecological
Footprint? |
He’s funny. He gets Hershey’s chocolate
syrup for mom, Perry Ellis perfume for dad, and – would you believe it!? –
Toblerone chocolates for me. He doesn’t even know I can buy Toblerone round the
corner, at Khanna uncle’s Cafe Shoppe! So this time, when he gave me the chocolate
bar, I looked most bored. I told him about the shop, and smiled at him. Sweetly. He smiled
back. His eyes grew large, and he ruffled my hair (I hate it!). "So!" he said.
"My nephew’s foot is growing."
Then began his eye-rolling. All day, all the
time. Hey, bigfoot. Hello, bigfoot. Howdy, bigfoot. He’s crazy! I hate him. He
follows me all the time, sweeps me off the ground, starts to pull my toes. "Hey-ho!
Your toes are so large!" He’s started diving for my ankles. "You need acres
of land to live, buddy!" He’s raw on me. "O, the way you live!" he
sings as I watch TV. Enough! This time, its war. Raw is war. I’ll chop his beard,
burn his books.
I made Mom take him out shopping. Went to his
room. Yuk, everything’s scattered. The socks smell. I picked up four books from the
bed, then went over to the desk. Picked up some loose sheets of paper all written over.
Then I saw this India map. There was a red dot on
Delhi. And all kinds of lines came out of this red dot and joined other dots and circles
all over the map. On the top was written and crossed out: Aditya’s Ecological
Footprint? Aditya, that’s me! I read also, in large letters: Carrying Capacity.
In my room, I adjusted my Nike cap and tried to
read the scribble on the map. "Punjab and Haryana are his wheat-bowl. The plains his
rice fields. Onions from Maharashtra. Rajasthan exists to give him meat. Himachal is his
fruit-garden. Maid and/or driver from UP, Bihar, Bengal, anywhere. Dhobi from...? Oil from
Middle-east. Peanut butter and video-games from US (made in Taiwan factory). Water from
the Tehri dam in future? Car from Korea (made in India). Wastepicker from Bangladesh.
Clothes..."
I gave up. And burnt the stuff I had taken from his
room. At dinner, I showed him the map. Dad took it and took a good look at it. "What
is this, Sarvesh?" Dad asked him. Dad read aloud: "How much of a load is little
Aditya on Earth? How much energy and materials must Earth produce to support him? How much
land to hold his life up? Why is his foot growing so large?" Dad stopped. Then banged
the table-top. "What the hell!"
Ya-hoo! Terrific quarrel. The monster has been
thrown out. Serves him right. How dare he call me Bigfoot?
Ecological footprint
For every kind of energy or form of matter we consume, some land,
somewhere, gets used up. How much land?
For every kind of thing we consume, we produce waste. How much land is required to
absorb that waste in order to cancel out its harmful effects?Ecological Footprint analysis
begins with these two questions. You can calculate the ecological footprint of a person, a
city, an economy, a part of that economy, or the world.
 Fossil fuels (like petrol, diesel, kerosene, LPG) are
nothing but the energy of ecosystems today to be found buried deep inside the earth.
William Rees, an ecological footprint analysis pioneer, calls these ecosystems phantom
land. The ecosystems are dead and gone. But we are still using the fruits of those
ecosystems, their energy. It is as if those dead ecosystems are as much present as all the
other ecosystems whose resources we today use! |
An ecological footprint is like a magnifying glass. It allow us to read the
small print: how much of a burden is our life-style on earth’s resources?
Earth’s resources are not unlimited. To therefore know our footprint is also to ask:
how sustainably do we live?
Carrying capacity
It is the ‘load’ our life-styles impose upon the earth.
To live unsustainably is to overload the earth with our wants.
East or West, cycling is best:
The ecological footprint of a person travelling 10 km. a day (to work and back) differs,
depending on what the person uses to travel.
|
A
Down To Earth Supplement
