After preaching at my church, I had a friend forward me an article in The Toronto Star about the WWF's recent report on the ecological state of the earth. Canada ranks 4th in the world in terms of average "ecological footprint"; that magic rating system used to describe the relative amount of resources one consumes.
I decided to take the test myself:
| CATEGORY | GLOBAL HECTARES |
| FOOD | 2.6 |
| MOBILITY | 0.9 |
| SHELTER | 0.4 |
| GOODS/SERVICES | 1 |
| TOTAL FOOTPRINT | 4.9 |
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.7 PLANETS.
As you can see, I need some work, especially on my food consumption. Almost all of the food I eat is pre-packaged and shipped from somewhere far away. However, to quote Nicholas Klassen formerly of Adbusters Magazine "I'm downright Ghandian by North American consumption standards." I think half the trick is to not consume more as life goes on, and the salaries bloat. We could do more. Buy local produce. Buy fresh baked bread. The ironic thing is that a lot of things that are probably good for the global ecology actually cost more. So much for spending less. Any other suggestions?
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Speaking of spending less, I'm loving the amazing things that people like Adbusters and Make AFFLUENCE History are doing. www.makeaffluencehistory.org seems to be broken lately, so I googled and found http://globalaware.net/affluence/, which seems to be the same people. At any rate this is cool, if not funny.
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I recently left my toque in a hotel in Ingersoll, and so I had to call them and ask them to ship it to me. On the Purolator slip it says "Full name: Nathan Smergold". I always thought that Smergold was a more common name than Sherwood.
