I, Bigfoot

We are the earth intruders
We are the earth intruders
Muddy with twigs and branches
A-haaaaaa!
Bjork : Earth Intruders

According to the Earth Day Ecological Footprint Quiz, I am a small man with a big consumption. Something to the effect of needing 4.5 planets if everyone in the world were to live like me.

Gasp!

Of course, I beg to differ. The entire quiz was very generalized. It assumes consumptions based on who knows what kind of figures, without taking into account what I actually consume. For example, I doubt they know I'm living in a house with no air-conditioning or water heating. So just what did they assume my electrical consumption to be?

Granted, being the only one in my apartment (most of the time) and the only one in my car (most of the time) means I absorb most of the consumption costs into my personal footprint rather than sharing it out with a few people. But hey, on the plus side, whatever the impact I may have on this planet, I'm not likely to increase the population pressures by breeding more resource-hungry organisms. In fact, after I'm dead (and my body has fully decomposed), there'll be a nett reduction of the world's population by one, having left no progeny to continue my legacy of consumption.

Anyway, I had another go at the quiz, and found that it is possible to bring my footprint down to a sustainable level. I just need to take some drastic measures:

1. Take public transport everywhere I go. But that's only if I can't walk there in the first place. Kinda like my old college days.

2. Live in 600 square-foot apartment. With 5 other people. Again, kinda like my old college days (my, I was pretty sustainable back then!).

3. Be a vegan. And only eat vegetables I grow on my own. In that 600 square-foot apartment I share with 5 other people.

4. To avoid spending half my life on a bus or train due to #1 above, I'll have to work from home. So every time my company builds a treatment plant, they'd have to build it in or near my house. Hope my 5 housemates and 1 vegetable plot won't mind.

5. Public transport here isn't effective. I'd have to stage a coup and depose our current government whose commitment to improving public transportation is overshadowed by their need to protect "national interests", ie. making sure the national car maker gets to sell more cars.

I said it's possible. Never said anything about probable.

Seriously though, it does make one stop to think. I've always been environmentally aware but I guess using energy-saving bulbs for my home isn't quite enough. So maybe I really do need to get someone to move in with me and share my bed ecological footprint...