Calculate your Carbon Footprint

Calculate your Carbon Footprint

•Go to http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/carboncalculator

 

and calculate your carbon footprint.

 

If you are not presently in the U.S., take this test anyways, and tell us what you think the role of changing infrastructure is on the result of this test. I encourage you to do the detailed version of this test for shopping since it helps us break down what we shop for. Of course, you are welcome to do the detailed analysis for any of the categories and share what you discovered.

 

Please share what you found out about your footprint and any comments and questions about this carbon footprint calculator. Then consider one of the following questions to delve deeper into the concept of the human footprint:

 

a.What is the difference between a carbon footprint and an ecological footprint?

 

b. What will it take to change that footprint (either carbon or ecological)? Be specific about the change and what exactly it changes. Are those changes personal changes or societal changes?

 

2. Understanding cycles is part of systems thinking. In nature, there are cycles and cycles within cycles. Let’s discuss the concept of cycles by providing specific examples of natural cycles and how they relate to what human systems need to become if we are to live sustainably:

 

a. Please provide specific examples from the biogeochemical cycles you viewed and read about last week. Could it be described as a borrow-use-return process? Explain why or why not.

 

3.a. What are the three resource trends occurring presently?