Stories tagged with "ecological footprint"
Advice to Pres. Obama (#6): Beware the Hungry Ghosts
Posted by Jason Bradford on January 28, 2009 - 10:13am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: ecological footprint, obama energy advice [list all tags]
This article is one of a series of articles offering energy advice to President Obama and his administration.
January 2009
Dear President Obama,
You don’t know me personally, but we have a few things in common. Like you, I became a community organizer after earning an advanced degree (my doctorate is in biology). Thanks for dramatically elevating the status of my current work. I was also elected president once, though that was over twenty years ago while I was in high school. Our children are about the same age (my pair are boys) and I especially enjoyed watching yours during the inauguration, imagining what an adventure this must be for them.
The theme of your campaign was hope. Quite honestly, I don’t have a whole lot of hope for my children’s future, and that’s why I am doing something as audacious as writing you a letter. I am a worker, not a big complainer, and I will suggest some concrete steps that would make me hopeful. But first I want to connect hope to something else, realism.
Hope begins by facing the truth because decisions made in a state of denial are likely to be poor ones. Sometimes, truth is painful, and so hope may only arise through a path of disillusionment. Our country has been living in a state of denial for a long, long time, and now many are disillusioned. My question is: Will you lead a process of truth telling? Are we going to stop scapegoating and over-simplifying our troubles, and get to the core of our predicament? We may have to shed a lot of healing tears along the way, but people are waiting for this.
Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse
Posted by Sam Foucher on May 16, 2007 - 11:07am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: collapse, consumption, ecological footprint [list all tags]
This is a guest story by Professor François Cellier.
François Cellier is a specialist in modeling and simulation of physical systems and is teaching system simulation and control at the Institute of Computational Science of ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
This article explores dynamic relations governing population growth, resource depletion, and world economics by means of a few simple modeling and simulation exercises. To this end, we start out by exploring the concept of an ecological footprint, representing the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc. and place it in relation with the human development index, a measure of the quality of life of an individual. We then relate the ecological footprint to the per capita energy consumption. This discussion serves to provide a quantitative understanding of the limited resources that are at our disposal.
The article continues by exploring the dangers and seductions of exponential growth, and uses a system dynamics approach to illustrate why we are moving at a rapid pace toward global collapse with our eyes wide shut.
The article ends by discussing what we would need to do in order to avoid the looming collapse.
Burning Buried Sunshine
Posted by Dave Cohen on September 27, 2006 - 4:07pm
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: bioenergy, carbon emissions, climate change, ecological footprint, fossil fuels, jeffrey dukes, mathis wackernagel, overshoot, peat swamp forests [list all tags]
Figure 1
Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.


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