What is an Ecological Footprint?

An ecological footprint is a relatively new way of looking at one's impact on the environment. It allows one to examine the resources used and find out how much area is needed to sustain a certain lifestyle. Ecological footprints can help guide consumption levels to ensure that all people have an adequate standard of living without depleting and destroying natural resources. The Earth has a finite amount of usable space, thus it is possible to determine how much space is available for each person. There are roughly 6 billion people on the planet which averages out to about 1.5-2.2 usable hectares per person. Most North Americans do not even come close to approaching this goal.

The ecological footprint concept can be applied to both individuals and communities. The Carleton campus is an interconncted network of people and processes. We share building space, living space, and a food service. How much land does it take to sustain this institution? Does Carleton hog more than its fair share of resources?

In calculating Carleton's footprint, we attempted to consider all factors connected with Carleton students and the institution itself. We included every building on campus, campus land, student food, student transportation, student waste and goods used by students. We did not include all of these factors for faculty and staff because most college employees live off campus and may live far away. For this reason, we decided constrain our data to students and things very specific to Carleton.

We made several assumptions in calculating this footprint. For categories where campus-wide data was not available we used averages from the individual footprints calculated by members of the Biology 190 class. We assumed that there are 1,800 students enrolled at Carleton. We know this number fluctuates, but we chose a consistent number to work with because small changes in enrollment will not significantly affect Carleton's footprint. We decided to extrapolate from class data rather than exclude certain sections that lack campus-wide data because we wanted to create the most comprehensive footprint possible.

To calculate this footprint, we used an Excel spreadsheet provided by our Biology 190 professor, Phil Camill. The main categories considered in this spread sheet are food, housing, transportation, goods, services and waste.