My Ecological Footprint

An ecological footprint is the amount of the Earth’s resources that are required to sustain an individual or community and their impact on the environment. This is calculated by incorporating multiple factors and is expressed as the amount of land required to sustain their use of natural resources. I feel this is a useful measure for understanding ones impact on the environment and natural resources, especially the final tally of acres that are need to sustain my lifestyle and the total number of Earths that would be needed if everyone had the same impact and need the same amount of acres to sustain their lifestyle. I also think that most people would respond to a calculation like this one because it is expressed in numbers additionally

First the mobility category, I drive to work and to school, there is no immediate change I can make about driving to work but I can definitely begin riding my bicycle to school. If I were to ride to school instead of drive I would reduce my driving time each week by one hour, over the course of a year approximately 45 hours of driving equaling around 175 gallons of gasoline. Just by making this one change I could significantly reduce my ecological footprint in the mobility category. Another change that could make a significant impact on my ecological footprint is by having more than one person live in my house. This would decrease the amount of land that is used to house people. This would cause the overall usage of energy and water for my household increase, but overall it would be less than if these people were living in separate places. If everybody were to all live in homes by themselves we would quickly run out of space to house people. Both of these changes that I could make would absolutely make a difference, especially the mobility changes since that is based on the use of a nonrenewable natural resource and the use of these products contributes to climate change. One change I would like make, is to purchase more of the food I eat from local sources but is difficult based on the location of Tucson and its climate. A lot of the food that is sold in Tucson is transported here from more productive agricultural areas from around the