My Godzilla Footprint
by Alice Miro
One of my favorite authors, David Orr, once remarked: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
After spending a week in New Mexico, the Hopi nation and the Navajo nation, I think the planet needs more people like Roberto, Lillian, Andrew, Coda, Pati, and Terrie. Like the corn of the Black Mesa, these are diverse, wholesome, beautiful guests of planet Earth– people who are deeply rooted in their communities and whose strength and ability to survive with little, almost nothing, is a miracle worth the deepest reverence.
When we visited Roberto’s family, I was enthralled by the simplicity of his house and lifestyle. My 70-sq-ft bedroom contains more useless junk i.e. electronic gadgets, clothing-I-never-wear, made-in-China stationery, than his entire 87,120-sq-ft (~2-acre) farm. When we visited Lillian’s home, I was intrigued by the way a group of children was handling water, with the greatest care, as if it was a treasure. I live in Vancouver BC and definitely take water for granted. I just realized that today, when I used one gallon of water to rinse a not-so-dirty cup, and the images of the Black Mesa suddenly came to my mind.
Roberto and his community reminded me that my Ecological Footprint is a Godzilla Monster. An Ecological Footprint is the amount of renewable and non-renewable bioproductive land required to support an individual, i.e. the land needed to produce my food, clothes, shelter materials, and assimilate my waste. There are only 28.2 billion acres of bioproductive land available on Earth. The average Canadian has an Ecological Footprint of 21.4 acres of bioproductive land. If all 6 billion people in the world consumed as much as most of us do in North America, we would need 4-5 Earths!
The greatest paradox is that the Godzilla impact of people like me mostly affects people like Roberto whose Footprint is probably seven times smaller than mine. During our visit to his farm, Roberto explained that due to climate change, they had been receiving considerably less rain, at a later and later time in the season. This drastically affects their corn crops, food production and, ultimately, subsistence. I was shocked to realize how Ms. Alice Miro from Vancouver BC was negatively impacting the life of Roberto Nutlouis from Pinon AZ. To further the irony, I had just released 0.438 tons of CO2 to fly from British Columbia to New Mexico. Enough already, I just made a pledge that after July 20th 2006, I will no longer fly for at least another 12 months.