My Ecological Footprint

I do not necessarily believe that this program is accurate and I question the formulas used to calculate how many Earth’s would be needed according to each person’s lifestyle. I do however believe that this program asks important questions that often get overlooked due to the busy lifestyles that people live today. By answering each question you get clues for how to lessen your impact on the Earth. To use a simple example if the response options are sometimes, never, or always for turning off the lights and you respond with never, it is very clear what the better options are. Though it seems quite obvious, I have never thought about the fact that buying organic food is good for the environment, I have only thought about how it directly benefits my own health. I am pleased to see that I am below the country average for each category but since I am from the United States I do not expect our country average to be very good in the first place and it does not surprise me that Australia has lower averages than the U.S. The importance of this program is that it brings important lifestyle habits to the user’s attention and forces them to consider that there may be more ecologically conscious ways to live.
I would like to know how some of my specific choices benefit the environment individually. I would like to see a program like this that tells me how many plastic bags I save a year by bringing my reusable bags to the store and how that helps the environment. I would like to know what it means in numbers every time I turn off the lights when I leave the room. I think what I am getting at is that this program has a valid point but is very broad. Telling me that I waste 100 trees worth of paper a month puts things in perspective better than giving me a footprint report that encompasses many things.
I would consider myself a very ecologically conscious person to begin with. I turn of the lights, take the car out to do all of my shopping at once rather than taking many different trips, recycling everything I have that can be recycled, and bringing my own bags, even making my friends recycle and turn off the lights. The fact that I still need 4.68 Earths is alarming because clearly what I am doing is not enough. This could be a result of the lifestyle humans are used to living in developed countries and would call for much bigger changes than recycling or turning off the lights. We are still transitioning into an environmentally conscious community and I am confident that within the next 10-20 years more appliances will be high efficiency and more water controlling faucets and showers will be used but today old appliances still work so the cost of replacing them is not worth it in a consumer’s eyes. I hope that I am correct in saying that environmentally friendly things will become the standard in homes, work places, malls, etc. in the future as old things break and phase out.