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Our
Ecological
Footprint
Think of your city
as an ecosystem |
| For every kind of energy or matter we consume
to maintain our lifestyles, some natural resource, somewhere, gets used up, and waste is
produced. The city is an ecosystem, with inputs in the form of land, water, energy, food
and materials from the hinterland which, after being utilised, become waste, the output.
The Ecological Footprint is a measure of the load
imposed by a particular population or economy on nature. It represents the land (and
water) area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption and waste
discharge by that population. It is an accounting tool that allows us to estimate the
resource consumption and waste assimilation requirements of a particular human population
or economy in terms of corresponding productive land area.
The Environment Education Unit of the Centre for
Science and Environment regularly organises ecotours for school students that focus on
Delhi’s Ecological Footprint. The area affected by a Delhite’s lifestyle is not
limited to the geographical boundaries of the city but his or her ecological footprint
extends far beyond to distant places. Whether it is water from the Himalayas, when we have
exhausted our own supplies, or the increasing demand for mutton, which destroys the
fragile grasslands of Rajasthan because of over-grazing, Delhi is a rapacious monster.
Forests in states as far away as Madhya Pradesh and Assam meet the demand for firewood in
Delhi.
Four issues that touch upon nearly every problem,
except energy and air pollution, that our city faces today, have been selected:
Waste Disposal: Raising a
stink!
River Pollution: Yamuna Yuk Ride
Water Harvesting: Water Walk
The Delhi Ridge: Jungle Jog
The selection was
made with the express purpose of explaining the twin concepts of the city as an ecosystem
and the ecological footprint to students. Over the years, we have lost the ability to use
locally available resources in a sustainable manner. After polluting and depleting
regional resources, we reach further to other people’s (temporary) surpluses. For
example, the Yamuna, which supplies 70% of Delhi’s |
If we all lived like Americans, we
would need two additional planet Earths to produce resources and absorb wastes ...and good
planets are hard to find!
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drinking water, is a stream of poison with
indiscriminate dumping of raw industrial and domestic sewage. Today, our city faces a
water crisis. Groundwater sources are disappearing due to over-exploitation, and the
Yamuna isn’t fit to drink from. So dams like Tehri, which submerge forests and
villages, are built. Ancient water harvesting structures such as those at
FUNDUNG |
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Mehrauli, Hauz Khas and Anangpur, were once used
to augment water supply, and after an age of neglect, are now being rediscovered as a part
of the process of solving the water crisis. The unique urban forest — the Delhi Ridge
— which acts as a sink for carbon dioxide and serves to mitigate the burgeoning air
pollution situation in Delhi, is vanishing before our very eyes. A visit to waste disposal
sites brings us face to face with the wastefulness of our lifestyles. Visiting composting
and recycling plants makes us look at garbage as a resource to be dealt with, rather than
something useless to be dumped and forgotten until the crisis is too big to handle.
The Ecological Footprint Project
The objective of the City-as-an-Ecosystem ecotours
is to widen the perspective of students towards their city’s environment and to
sensitise them to the symbiotic relationship between a city, its inhabitants and the
environment. How a city functions as an ecosystem, consuming resources and producing
waste. How it’s ‘ecological footprint’ extends beyond its limits and how it
affects the environment. (See the Teachers Manual on
these ecotours on the back page) |
Children’s
Manifesto on Clean Air
We were inundated with a flood of entries. Here’s what
some of them had to say: |
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"This polluted air is terrible
for us children as it doesn’t allow us to take part in sports activities."
Kushal Banerjee,
Std VII,
New Delhi"Air is polluted
by industries and vehicles. People should go to court and start an agitation against the
polluters."
Arani Guha, Std
VII,
West Bengal
"As the future generation,we have full
right to clean air. But our elderlies are polluting it. We children have not done anything
wrong to it, then why are we getting polluted air?"
S. Nikhil Nair, Std VII,
New Delhi |
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A Down To
Earth Supplement
