A Knitting Academic

This post is to log and share some ecological footprint calculators and give people an idea of the over consumption that we take for granted. I first encountered these calculators for a class assignment and they now form the basis for my career! Hope everyone learns something. (you can click to expand the pictures of my results as of 12.04.2008) Redefining Progress is the best calculator, I think. You can pick a lot more countries. If everyone is a vegan, drives almost never, carpools, lives with 5 other people in a large apartment building in the inner city, never flies, maintains a garden, buys almost never and always organic/sustainable, uses 30% renewable energy, buys carbon offsets, and takes every measure to recycle and conserve resources. Then we need 0.87 earths. That's perfect! The Footprint Network and Earthday Site use scales and not numbers (which is nice) and try to draw a picture of your lifestyle. The Ecology Fund is a very short and sweet version. The WWF has a ...

The film demonstrates the importance of imagery in conveying context. A chinese man whose photo was taken at the three gorges dam commented "It's a very broad view. It's hard to see the detail." And I think this comment was more relevant to our context halfway around the world, than the image itself. The film provides a new perspective on your personal belongings. One of the most striking scenes is of a shipbreaking shore in Chittagong, Bangladesh - showing what happens to our oil tankers. We see them manually disassembled in the film and the 18-20 year old men who scrape the leftover crude from the bottom. I would like to thank Dr. Webber for giving us this assignment because I've wanted to watch this film since last semester and never got around to it. It's fantastic and I highly recommend it. The trailer is a little doomsday, so see relevant clips here . Just ignore the creepy music in it and the film. A quote by the photographer explains the point of...