{"id":496,"date":"2006-06-12T22:14:38","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T06:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=496"},"modified":"2007-07-31T19:19:39","modified_gmt":"2007-08-01T03:19:39","slug":"giant-footprint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=496","title":{"rendered":"Giant Footprint, Little Pawprint"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m little by little working on making my ecological footprint<\/a> smaller. The average American has a 24-acre footprint, and currently the planet has only 4.5 acres per person. So we’re pretty lousy about taking care of our planet.<\/p>\n

Right now, my footprint is about 14 acres. Compared to the American average, it’s pretty modest. I eat very little meat. I now cook a lot of my own food using fresh ingredients instead of heating up packaged food or going out to eat. I drive maybe 12 miles a week. I have a small car that gets great gas mileage. And I live in a relatively small place using energy efficient lights and generating much less trash than most of my neighbors.<\/p>\n

Still, a 14-acre footprint is huge. Try finding a shoe that size, and you’ll see. If everyone lived like me, we’d need three and a half planets to sustain everyone. I can see it now, the Martians complaining loudly about the unchecked illegal immigration and the Venusians up in arms about the increased traffic.<\/p>\n

So I’d love to get my footprint down to 5 or 6 acres, if it’s possible—4.5 if I were really ambitious, which I’m not. I think what dinged me this year was all the hours spent in an airplane during my trip to Australia, and I’ll be spending more time on planes this year, when I attend a couple of weddings and possibly take another H.E.-funded vacation. So … I need to figure out ways to balance that.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I can replace the napa cabbage in my diet with grass from outside. Instead of salmon or fish cake, I can dig up worms and bugs for my protein. I could give up the small condo and live in my car, and if I keep it parked near my post office box, I’ll never have to drive, since a grocery store is just across the street. I’ll use candles instead of electricity, and I’ll make all of my own clothes using softly spun cat hair. The cat … she sheds a lot now that the weather is warm again, and one could make sweaters out of the handfuls of fur I collect daily when I brush her hair.<\/p>\n

But that’s silly. I don’t need to do all that. The cat hair sweaters alone should suffice.<\/p>\n

I could save a dying world by recycling shed cat hair, and if cat-allergic people go extinct, that just makes our collective footprint that much smaller.<\/p>\n

Who said solving world problems was hard?<\/p>\nShare this post:

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I’m little by little working on making my ecological footprint smaller. The average American has a 24-acre footprint, and currently the planet has only 4.5 acres per person. So we’re pretty lousy about taking care of our planet. Right now, my footprint is about 14 acres. Compared to the American average, it’s pretty modest. I eat very little meat. I now cook a lot of my own food using fresh ingredients instead of heating up packaged food or going out…<\/p>\n

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