This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Ecological footprint analysis has gained considerable momentum around the world as both heuristic device and practical method for assessing sustainability. This success derives in part from methodological strengths of EFA that are both scientifically well founded and reflect thinking people’s intuitive sense of reality. On the technical/scientific side, EFA has several qualities that reinforce its credibility as a sustainability indicator. The method: acknowledges that humans are biophysical entities that make constant metabolic demands on their supportive ecosystems and that all our manufactured capital and related cultural artefacts impose a parallel and much larger industrial metabolism on the ecosphere; recognizes the crucial role of natural capital and natural income (biophysical stocks and flows) in economic development and sustainability; accepts that the economy is a fully contained, growing, dependent, sub-system of the non-growing ecosphere; recognizes the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate governor of material transformations and economic activity (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1991) and that beyond a certain (optimal) scale, the growth and maintenance human enterprise must necessarily accelerate the entropic disordering and dissipation of the ecosphere; is closely related conceptually to Odum’s the embodied energy (emergy) analyses (see Hall 1995) and the ‘environmental space’ concept of the Sustainable Europe Campaign (Carley and Spapens 1998). accounts for both population size and resource consumption in estimating of appropriated ecosystem area. This aligns EFA closely with Catton’s (1980) concept of human ‘load’ (population times per capita consumption); corresponds closely to and incorporates all the factors in Ehrlich’s and Holdren’s (1971) well-known definition of human impact on the environment: I = PAT, where ‘I’ is impact, ‘P’ is population, ‘A’ is affluence (i.e., level of consumption) and ‘T’ is a technology scalar.
Energy | Growth | Law | Method | Qualities | Sense | Size | Success | Technology | Thinking | World |
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
People are intelligent beings capable of responding rationally to new knowledge particularly if it can be shown to be directly relevant to their own circumstances. For this reason, the eco-footprint concept resonates better with the public than do more abstract and impersonal sustainability indicators. In particular, people appreciate the way EFA draws them into reflecting on their personal consumption habits as illustrated by the popularity of EFA-oriented web-sites that offer simple calculators that visitors can use to estimate their personal eco-footprints. Attributes of EFA that help to communicate biophysical reality to the public include the following: The method is conceptually simple and intuitively appealing. Even sceptics recognize that that they have a positive ecological footprint. EFA personalizes sustainability by focusing on consumption—everyone is a consumer and must ultimately take responsibility for his/her own ‘load’ on the planet. EFA consolidates measurable energy and material flows into a single concrete variable, the corresponding appropriated land/water (ecosystem) area. Land itself is a powerful indicator. Everyone understands ‘land.’ (Popular understanding of the ecological crisis is prerequisite to any politically viable solutions.) Eco-footprint estimates can be compared to finite local and global ‘supplies’ of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (i.e., people and populations can compare their demands to available bio-capacity). The ‘ecological deficit’—the difference between domestic bio-capacity and a larger eco-footprint—requires little explanation and many people see it as more important than the fiscal deficits with which their governments are often preoccupied! EFA appeals to both the ecologically and socially conscious. For example, it reflects gross material inequity but also shows that growth is not a sustainable option to relieve it. Perhaps as important as any other factor, ‘ecological footprint’ is a powerfully evocative metaphor—would people be as quickly captivated by the concept had it been called the ‘human impact index’ instead?
Abstract | Better | Energy | Global | Growth | Important | Knowledge | Little | Method | People | Popularity | Public | Reality | Responsibility | Understanding | Crisis |
Reshad Feild, born Richard Timothy Feild
Through conscious breath we receive the energies that God offers us every moment of our lives. If we do not take breath consciously, it is not surprising that we do not have the energy to make a commitment. If God made man in His image, then man can be conscious to breathe in from the six directions and from all the different kingdoms. If we breathe in from all directions and accept what God has given us, then we have the energy to make a commitment. Otherwise it is often a quasi-commitment. It is not real. The commitment may not go through.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
EFA [Ecological Footprint Analysis] starts from a series of simple premises: Human beings are integral components of the ecosystems that sustain us. We can therefore best assess ecological sustainability using biophysical data. Most human impacts on ecosystems are associated with energy and material extraction and consumption. These energy and material flows can be converted to corresponding productive or assimilative ecosystems areas. There is a measurable, finite area of productive land and water ecosystems on Earth. Every human population imposes an ‘ecological footprint’ on Earth equivalent to the amount of the planet’s productive capacity required to supply that population with resources and waste assimilation services. We therefore formally define the ecological footprint of a specified population as the area of land and water ecosystems required on a continuous basis to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate (some of) the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water may be located.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
Growth is a pressing moral imperative for those whose needs are not being met, and industrialized countries have not yet found ways to maintain their standard of living, without continued economic growth. One hopeful strategy to deal with this dilemma involves massive improvements in the efficiency of economic activity so that growth in consumption of goods and services is "decoupled" from growth in the use of energy and material. In theory, this should permit an increase in consumption to be accompanied by a decrease in resource use. In fact, this "dematerialization" of economic goods and services must proceed faster than economic growth to produce the necessary reduction in humanity's total load on the ecosphere. The political attractiveness of this approach is self-evident - it enables the rich to maintain their high material standards while freeing up the ecological space needed for the poor to increase theirs.
Efficiency | Energy | Growth | Space |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Do you know what God with form is like? Like bubbles rising on an expanse of water, various divine forms are seen to rise out of the Great akasa of Consciousness. The Incarnation of God is one of these forms. The Primal Energy sports, as it were, through the activities of a Divine Incarnation.
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people - and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
To drink pure water from a shallow pond one should gently take the water from the surface without disturbing the pond in the least. If it is disturbed, the sediments rise up and make the whole water muddy. If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices, without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Awakening is not possible so long as the mind is constantly distracted from Truth by remaining habitually egocentric, by instinctively seeking personal gratification. Divine Grace, the healing and illuminating energy that rains down ceaselessly upon the human mind, heart, and soul, cannot be absorbed or assimilated by the high, rocky hill of personal interest and personal importance. This precious, life-giving water runs off the high ground of ego, without ever penetrating its’ hard, barren soil.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.
"The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies", by Richard Heinberg is an introduction to the concept of peak oil and petroleum depletion. The book's main points are that modern industrial societies are completely dependent on fossil fuels, they are vulnerable to reductions in energy availability, fossil fuel depletion is inevitable, peak oil is imminent, and that oil plays a major role in US foreign policy, terrorism, war and geopolitics. [Wikipedia] The book rapidly surveys some basic ecological and thermodynamical concepts, which are then briefly applied to Western history. Means by which humans capture more energy and thereby raise their carrying capacity such as takeover, tool use, scope enlargement and drawdown are also introduced. The preceding strategies are adapted from William Catton's Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Colonialism and slavery are then viewed using the lens of energy capture and usage. Heinberg also relies upon work done by Joseph Tainter and his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter's main thesis being that complex societies collapse because "their strategies for energy capture are subject to the law of diminishing returns."
Capacity | Energy | Fate | Law | Means | Slavery | War | Work | Fate |
Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society
We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice — not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives — will have profound ethical and political ramifications.
When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. … Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants], and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.
Richard Corliss, fully Richard Nelson Corliss
Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form.
Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale
Expression of Gratitude to the Lord Almighty at these occassions daily; For gift of Memory at dawn, For the gift of Energy at meal times, and for the gift of Peace at night is called Trikal Sandhya.