If Your Money or Your Life is the tool for transforming our relationship with money and figuring out how much is enough as individuals, the Ecological Footprint is the tool for understanding what our collective lifestyle and consumption habits mean to the planet.

Once we started to get a handle on our own spending and consumption and simplify our lives, we came to understand more clearly how combined human consumption is denigrating the earth. In 1998 we became aware of the Ecological Footprint concept detailed in the book with the same title by Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees. We immediately saw how this tool can dramatically illustrate the environmental crisis we face.

In the Ecological Footprint concept human consumption is translated into the acres of productive land and sea required to provide the resources to make all the products we use, all the food we eat – and to assimilate all the waste products we generate. In other words, it’s the land that is required on this planet to support our current lifestyle forever. Our “footprint” is a measurement of the resources that provide every product and service that each of us consumes.

If we divide the current human population of the earth (about 6.1 billion) into the available productive land and sea space we end up with about 4.7 acres per person. (An acre is about the size of a football field.) To picture what your ecological footprint is, visualize football-field-size units, scattered around the earth, of fields of cotton, grain and pasture land, mines, oil wells, forests, landfills, toxic waste dumps, factories, freeways etc. -- all the resources to support your existing lifestyle. Now you are picturing your Ecological Footprint on earth.

The average American citizen’s footprint is 24 acres. Canada’s is 17. Europe 9-14. Japan 11. Mexico 6. China 4. India 2. The good ol’ USA uses more of the earth’s resources than any other country – by far. And now most of the peoples of the planet are trying to emulate our materialistic lifestyle. It simply can’t be done. The earth cannot support such a high level of consumption. If everyone on earth lived like the average American it would take four earth’s worth of resources!

Our challenge is to find a way to balance human consumption and nature’s limited productive capacity. We can begin by each living simpler, less materialistic lifestyles right now.

For more information on the Ecological Footprint we encourage you to read the book and visit the global footprint network website. A quick “Footprint Calculator” is available at www.myfootprint.org which will show you where you are in relationship to international averages.