Content area
Full Text
HOW BIG IS YOUR FOOTPRINT?
Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1996.
Our Ecological Footprint is a guidebook for understanding and using the metaphor of a footprint as a measure of our impact upon the earth. The book is lively and conversational, with cartoon drawings giving a lift to the heavyweight ideas and research.
Wackernagel and Rees have taken an intuitive concept and refined it into a useful tool. We all see that some people consume more than others; we can understand that some people's actions have a greater impact on the environment than do others'. The authors define the ecological footprint as "a measure of the load" imposed by a given population on nature. It represents the land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption and waste discharge by that population.
The book is suitable for a wide range of readers. There is a section on ecological footprints for beginners, with mock dialogues between "Dr. Footnote" and...