Media Clipping — May 27, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Ecological footprints - Nova Scotians consume more than their share of the Earth's resources

Part 1 of a pair of articles by Silver Donald Cameron
See also second installment, Trimming our Footprint.

HERE IS A simple way to save the Earth.

Exterminate the populations of North America, Japan and Western Europe.

Probably not a plan. Hard to make it fly politically. But it's a thought that flickered through my mind as I reviewed the numbers in GPI Atlantic's recent publication. Released a few weeks ago, The Nova Scotia Ecological Footprint is the first such report for any province in Canada.

GPI Atlantic, you may recall, is the valiant little non-profit organization which is working to produce a Genuine Progress Index for Nova Scotia - an instrument designed to measure our real well-being, not merely our capacity to succeed at pointless or damaging economic activity. To learn more, or to order this new report, visit www.gpiatlantic.org.

The Nova Scotia Ecological Footprint is a startling document. Unlike most environmental assessments, it looks not at the impact of industry, but at consumption - the effect of eating fish or using lumber rather than the impact of the fishing or forest industries.

It starts from the fact that each of us withdraws a certain amount every year from the great Bank of Nature. Each of us requires a certain amount of land to produce our food, a certain amount of energy to run our households, a certain amount of forest to absorb the greenhouse gases we produce. The total demand I make on nature is my "ecological footprint" - the resources which I personally take from the planet. How much productive land and sea does my present lifestyle require?

Conversely, we can also calculate the amount of land and sea available to the human species, and ask, "What's my fair share?"

If you add up the total productive area of the Earth's land and sea, and divide it by the number of people on Earth, you discover that the Earth currently provides 1.8 hectares per person. But at today's level of demand, human beings are using 2.8 hectares per person. We are not just using the planet's resources; we are using them up - fishing out the oceans, demolishing the forests, impoverishing the topsoil, loading the air and the water with pollutants.

We're withdrawing our capital from the Bank of Nature.

The great strength of footprint analysis is that it reflects the complexity of the issues, and the interplay between them - population, pollution, depletion, national and global inequity, extinctions, and all the other emerging horsemen of the new apocalypse. By measuring all consumption against the same standard - hectares of productive land and sea - it provides a detailed portrait of the problem.

For example, gas-guzzling SUVs belch out twice as much greenhouse gas as compact cars, requiring twice as much forest land to absorb their emissions. It takes seven kilos of grain to produce a kilo of beef - so the agricultural footprint of meat-eaters is much higher than that of grain-eaters.

The average Nova Scotian household requires almost one full hectare to compensate for its energy use - which is four per cent above the Canadian average - partly because so many of us live in large, old, fully-detached rural houses.

Nearly 14 per cent of Nova Scotia's total energy footprint is in our food, 88 per cent of which we import. In addition, our electricity derives largely from coal, the dirtiest of all generating fuels. That's the main reason our total ecological footprint is higher than the Canadian average.

Overall, Canada's ecological footprint is 7.7 hectares per person. Nova Scotia's is 8.1 hectares, compared to 0.6 hectares for Bangladeshis, 1.3 for Africans, 1.8 for Asians, 12.2 for Americans, and 7.2 for OECD nations generally. The world's richest people constitute 30 per cent of the Earth's population, but consume 70 per cent of its resources. That's us, friends.

Footprint analysis measures the effects of consumption wherever they occur, and shows that the First World's reckless consumption is the engine which drives the global ecological overdraft.

Every Nova Scotian stresses the planet more than 13 Bangladeshis. We're part of the richest 20 per cent of the Earth's population, which consumes 45 per cent of its meat and fish, 58 per cent of its energy, and 84 per cent of its paper.

If the populations of the First World were exterminated tomorrow, the Earth's remaining 4.8 billion people could live happily ever after, since they draw from nature only what the biosphere can sustainably produce.

Probably not a plan, as I said. Still, what should we do about North America's runaway economy, which is ripping through the Earth's resources like a power saw going through a pine board?

The novel contribution of The Nova Scotia Ecological Footprint is that it measures what we're doing, reveals the trends, and pinpoints the most effective steps we could take - right here, right now - to reduce our impact on the planet.

Next week, we'll look at what GPI Atlantic thinks those steps might be.

Award-winning author Silver Donald Cameron lives in D'Escousse.

Copyright © 2001 Silver Donald Cameron