3.1 Ecological Footprints of Nations

We believe, that our community planning goals must be much more cognizant of and explicitly guided by the need to live within the limits of our environment. One overall measure of the extent of resource demands and the strains being placed on the environment is the notion of the “ecological footprint,” an idea recently popularized by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees. It is a measure of the land base needed to provide the energy, food, material, carbon sequestration, etc., associated with our lifestyles.³⁹ Amazingly, the latest calculations put the average American ecological footprint at more than ten hectares (about twenty-five acres). When compared to the global average of approximately 2.8 hectares, there is no denying the immense, and many believe unfairly large, ecological impact of our everyday lives. And the footprint has even been getting larger. The challenge of sustainability - indeed the challenge of our time - is to find ways to fundamentally reduce this footprint, to live within the limits of our natural environment, while at the same time enhancing the quality of our lives and the social fairness and equity of our society.⁴⁰

Smart growth, however, defines our land use problem in very narrow terms. As Rees, Wackernagel and others show, the land use and land consumption implications of our lifestyles are actually much more important than the land on which our homes are built or our apartments are erected. Our meat-eating habits affect the quality and condition of public grazing lands. Our coffee drinking habits result in serious destruction of bird habitat. Our thirst for water and electricity has meant the destruction of habitat and threatens the extinction of salmon and a host of other aquatic species. Our fossil fuel addiction translates into devastated landscapes in coal-mining regions and oil spills along coastlines.

Smart growth, indeed growth management generally, fails to take into account the tremendous ecological damage and resource drain resulting from current levels of population and consumption. We therefore believe our national agenda and debate should be driven more by assessments of natural carrying capacities of our planet (and nation) than by a mindless assumption of the virtues and inevitability of future growth. Estimating the carrying capacity of the Planet is a tricky thing, to be sure, but all indications are that we will be unable to sustain the present population at the present rate of consumption, let alone the projected future population.

This unsustainability is perhaps most evident in looking at our tremendous biological wealth, which is being destroyed and squandered at a rapid rate. The trends are not encouraging. For instance, the Nature Conservancy’s most recent species report card, which tracks the status of 20,000 species, reported that approximately one-third are either imperiled or vulnerable.⁴¹ Additionally, the first continental ecosystem assessment conducted by the World Wildlife Fund found that half of the nation’s 116 ecoregions are severely degraded.⁴²

A host of other indicators suggest that we have exceeded, and will further overshoot, our national environmental carrying capacity.⁴³ This is a complicated issue, but we definitely need to debate. Part of the answer depends on how much of the planet’s resources and wealth we feel it ethical to appropriate for human use. Already nearly fifty percent of primary plant productivity is devoted to the human species. This would seem to leave an unfairly small share for the remainder of the planet’s life communities.