find out if you are living a sustainable life

As always, Kana has the inside info on awesome websites. Today it's a game called Consumer Consequences: Sustainability Coverage, from America Public Media. Not the sexiest name, but very easy to use and informative; it's basically a pretty, interactive calculator that measures your consumption footprint on the Earth.

I think the takeaway message from this game is that we should consume less, and while that's obviously very true, one concern with encouraging personal conservation has always been and will always be the effect it has on people in the way that they view our collective resource and environmental crises. Every resident in the U.S. could decide to make some improvements to their consumption impact, and a handful could go live on co-ops and make clothes out of organic hemp, but without meaningful, drastic and comprehensive efforts on a national and global level, enforced by a government following the will of the people and the scientific evidence, tackling problems like global warming, water scarcity, increasing toxic waste, air pollution, and agricultural policy destructive to both the environment and our health, we will continue to have the problems we have. In fact, they're going to get worse.

My final score was 2.8 (mostly due to my frequent air travel and NYC style of eating out often), as in it would take 2.8 Earths to support the current world population if everyone lived the way I live. Two things I'd add to the game: 1) something looking at the impact of my electronics use, and 2) something looking at how substantial national policy change (signing the Kyoto Protocols, establishing carbon taxes, regulating industrial waste and water usage, etc.) would impact my overall score. My guess if that if the U.S. increased their use of renewable energies, our scores would still be greater than 1.0 Earths, but would be greatly reduced.

And only then would our individual life changes make a difference.