NSEE 8300 - Social Systems: Environmental Footprints

It’s not just how many footprints mark our presence on Earth. It’s how big those footprints are. At the heart of the ecological footprint are questions about equity, justice, and sustainability. The typical American consumes between four and eight times more resources than people of other cultures. Create a personal environmental impact statement while investigating the math, science, and social implications of how we live.

The Ecological Footprint is a tool used to measure an entity’s impact on the Earth’s available resources- an individual, a school, a city, or a nation. As participants learn more about how much of Earth’s biologically productive land they use, they develop an awareness of how consumption patterns relate to environmental equity. If Americans are using more resources than we can produce, we are, in a sense, using up someone else’s “stuff.” Teachers can use the Environmental Footprint as an objective tool to measure the global consequences of our actions as individual consumers, and as members of a larger culture.

Credits: 2