Great example LPH...

I was thinking about this conversation last night and came up with that trick for those who already live in less urban areas or even rural areas and are unlikely to move anytime soon, but want to reduce your footprint.

What you have is land. If you use it to grow your own vegetables and fruit, or even hold a little bit of livestock for your eggs, you'll reduce your footprint because that part of your daily food intake will be taken for locally... very locally. And it gives you a clear feeling of what your footprint actually is.

Like those who are lucky enough to burn wood from their own land, well, it makes it easy for to measure what their footprint is: how much forest (and work to pick up the wood and prepare it for burning) does it take to fire a woodstove so that the house is warm in the winter? Now if every house in the country was heated by the same means, how much forest would it take? Do we have enough trees left, relatively accessible, to do that sustainably, so there's some forest left for our kids to heat up their house? The current answer is of course no, which is why we dig for natural gas and coal, and import oil from abroad.

Now of course Emily please don't stop heating your house for this reason!!!!!! What I mean by this whole story is that when we move our footprint closer to ourselves, we realize how much space we need on this planet to cater to our modern needs. It doesn't really take the footprint down to know how big it is, but it certainly makes us more conscious of our weight on this planet. And more careful when we make our next choices about how we live, how we travel around, who we vote for, etc.

To be sedentary in the North, we'll always need to have a bigger footprint because, well, it's cold in the winter. Is that a reason to make it bigger and bigger, as we're currently doing (collectively, not necessarily individually)? I hope not. Yet that's what's happening right now, right here in Canada and certainly down there in the USA too. In those circumstances, every decision becomes important.