Low-impact living with Jane Powers
Last week, if someone had told me I was living in a way that wasn't showing proper responsibility towards the planet, I'd have been a little miffed. I garden organically, I compost, I recycle, I use public transport where possible and I don't clock up loads of air miles. I consider myself fairly environmentally aware. Yet when I calculated my ecological footprint - the number of ecologically productive hectares required to sustain my lifestyle - I received a nasty shock. At 6.1 hectares, my footprint is larger than that of the average Irish person, which measures 5.3.
If everyone lived like me, I was informed by the website that calculated my monstrous shoe size (www.ecofoot.org), we'd need 3.4 planets. Yikes. My main environmental shortcomings, it seems, are that I live in a house that is larger than necessary and don't share it with enough people. When I fibbed to the website and let on that I still lived in the much smaller house I'd inhabited before I was married, my footprint shrank to a mere 3.2 hectares, and 1.8 planets. And when I returned again to my present house, and gave myself five children - just for the couple of minutes it took to click the boxes and get my score (but not long enough for the kids to get cranky or hungry) - I achieved a respectable 3.4 hectares, and 1.9 planets.
Yet some ecological thinkers believe that having children in this overpopulated, fragile world is the one of the most environmentally damaging things you can do. And when you think about it, the last thing we need is more people. Which goes to show that there are many angles, and no easy answers, to the problem of how best to manage the planet's resources.
Which brings me back to this too-big house. I could move, of course. But what with my redecorating another home, and the new owners of my Victorian house tearing it apart and sticking it back together again, the amount of carbon and pollutants released into the atmosphere might make staying put a better option. In any case, we don't heat all the rooms, and we have two home offices here, which save on commuting, so I think we've knocked a couple of hectares off there.
Nonetheless, my possibly clodhopping imprint has got me thinking about how to slip my foot into something a little lighter. Until I work out how to make big changes, I'll be taking baby steps at Enfo's www.10steps.ie.