Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Supplemental Post - Another Site of Interest

Wow, I must be surfing a lot!

This is a great online quiz presented by American Public Media (the people that bring you NPR) that shows you how many "Earths" of natural resources it would take to sustain all 6.6 billion humans… if everyone lived like you. It shows a "picture" of how earth looks based on your lifestyle too -- I think I got coal plants spewing in the background, just from living in Virginia. Hmmmm.... Apparently, as a whole, they don't take global warming too seriously here. A state where gay marriage is illegal but recycling is a personal choice - anyone else see a problem with those legislative priorities? I guess they're more concerned about burning in the hereafter, than here on earth. But that's a whole other rant...

My final result? I'm embarrassed to tell you that if everyone lived like me, we'd need 3.8 earths to sustain the lifestyle! And this is AFTER all my greening efforts to date! Imagine what it was like before I started this journey! The neat thing is, though, that in addition to getting to see my usage in bar graphs (inner-geek), I got to see the areas of my lifestyle that really need improving. I was surprised to see that "food" was one of my worst categories. Please don't take away my coffee... I have children, for God's sake!

Anyhow, here's the link.

1 comment:

Wendy said...

I took this quiz a few weeks ago (which would be about a month or two after you posted this ;). We'd need 2.6 planets if everyone lived like my family. The worst area for us was also food. However, most of our diet is local foods, including the meat we eat (even beef and pork, of which we eat a great deal). The quiz didn't allow for a credit based on where our food originated, and when I said we eat beef, the calculations seemed to be based on the assumption that our beef comes from a CAFO, which it doesn't. We've been greening for a long time, and I was actually embarrassed to find through all of our efforts we'd still need more Earth than is available.

But like you, my thought was with all we've done, imagine what it used to be like!