New Haven Independent

Mathis Wackernagel (pictured), co-founder of this ingenious measurement tool, said it’s not about feeling guilty if you score high (resource-intensive) or feeling superior if you score low. He explained that in a talk he gave at Yale’s Forestry School on Thursday.

He doesn’t tell people to drive less or eat less meat. “Just maximize your quality of life,” he said. “What does it take to use your budget of time best on this amazing planet? Do you want to focus on maximizing your income, or fulfilling your dreams? If people think about what makes them most happy, most people will come to the conclusion to change their lives in a way that, at the same time, also reduces their footprint.”

The Ecological Footprint is a tool that measures how much land and water humans need to produce the resources they use and to absorb the waste they create using existing technology.

Today, humans are consuming almost 25 percent more resources each year than can be regenerated annually. That doesn’t even consider what non-human life forms need and use. The average world need is 4.5 acres per person, but Americans use about 24 acres per person, or about five earths.

My footprint worked out to needing 4.1 worlds to accommodate all the humans now on earth. My downfall was that only two people currently live in my spacious home. If my two kids still lived with us, my score would have been much better. (But it’s not about the score, I have to keep reminding myself.)

Wackernagel — a Swiss citizen living in Oakland, California, since 1999 — works with organizations and government entities around the world, like Local Governments for Sustainability and the Network of Regional Governments for Sustainability. One U.S. city (Sarasota, Florida) is among the 500 members of the former, and one U.S. county (Marin County, California) is among the 50 members of the latter. He said that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has shown some interest, as have several groups in Connecticut, where he’s doing two intensive workshops in April and May. He considers the Nutmeg state a leader on many environmental issues, and thus fertile ground for his efforts.

In a conversation after his talk at Yale, Wackernagel reiterated, “The footprint is not about how bad things are or how bad you are. It’s just a statement of where you’re at and what we can do about things. It’s also about the systems you have built around you. Americans love to go to Italy, where the footprint is about two and a half times smaller than in the U.S. — not because they are more virtuous, ecologically speaking, but because they have inherited cities that are very compact, where local food is more available. So this allows people to have a very high quality of life at much lower resource consumption, or footprint. So the first attention needs to go toward [figuring out] how can we build infrastructures that support high-quality lifestyles and low footprints?”