How much adverse impact do you have on your environment? How many resources do you use, as a measure of land, water, and energy? Your environmental footprint, or your ecological footprint, is the answer to that question. One site, the 'Global Footprint Network,' measures how quickly we "consume resources and generate waste," as an impact in six different areas: carbon footprint, built-up land, forest, cropland & pasture, and fisheries. Other environmental footprint calculators focus on the amount of time it would take the earth to regenerate itself, were everyone to live in the same manner as the subject.
Variables measured in order to calculate an individual's environmental footprint include what sort of food you eat (and how much of it is meat, poultry, and dairy); where your food comes from; how large your home is; whether or not the energy you use is renewable; how much you travel, and which modes of transportation you use; whether you recycle; and whether, and how often, you fly.
The chief drawback of these environmental footprint measures is that they are rather simplistic, categorizing an individual's footprint based largely on which country he or she lives, and the norms therein. A rural farmer, for instance, who grows all his food (including meat and dairy) using sustainable, organic methods, who lives with a family of seven in a big rambly farmhouse but drives many miles each week to deliver produce to a farmer's market might score far worse than a vegetarian, living alone and playing the Wii for exercise, and who drives a Hummer only 20 miles a week.
However, these tools are admirable for revealing the resource overuse of which many of us (i.e. North Americans) are guilty; according to the Earth Day Network, supporting a world population who all lived like Americans would require more than five planets just like Earth.
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