Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The Human Footprint

Did anyone else watch his show tonight on the National Geographic channel?? I wanted to see it because it sounded like it might be pretty interesting from the previews...laying out in a very graphic, easy to understand way what kind of impact we have on our earth. It brought up some pretty interesting statistics...we go through 12 cars in our lifetimes, 15 computers, 46,000+ cans of soda...there were lots of other things they mentioned...and this was only for the population of the United States. We are 5% of the world population and we own 30% of the cars and use 1/4 of the oil in the world. It made me feel guilty that we have so much more than most of the other countries in the world. It makes we worry about what our world will look like for our children and their children, etc, etc, etc. But all I could think about while I was watching this show was, "Look at all they are wasting!! Aren't they as bad as what they are talking about?!?" They used actual items to show us our footprint! Thousands of loaves of bread, thousands of "almost expired" eggs (which they put into the scoop of a tractor and dumped of the floor, by the way!), thousands of pints of milk (in the picture), tens of thousands of soda cans! What are they doing with this stuff afterwards?? They didn't say! I thought for sure it couldn't all be real and they are just using computers to create all the mass of stuff, but they showed high speed video of people arranging it!! So I guess the show is good to help bring our attention to this stuff, but it seemed a bit counterproductive at the same time!! I guess this is the "frugal zealot" in me speaking out over the stomach ache this show left me with! I will get off of my soapbox now. Thank you for listening. :)

1 comment:

Rochelle said...

sounds interesting...i will have to check it out. it is amazing how much we have and still want more. i saw a preview for a 20/20 where they took away "stuff" from a family for a week to see how they would survive...no cells, tvs, computers, etc. it looked pretty interesting.