Maybe it's that they mean support us with out having to radically change
our surroundings like you mention. 

We may be able to support ourselves on this land, but definitely do not
tread lightly upon it.

Benjamin E. Neigebauer
Software Engineer
Compellent Technologies
Eden Prairie, MN 55344


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Hoffbeck [mailto:rwh at visi.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 9:41 AM
To: TCLUG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Wildly OT www.myfootprint.org

Thanks, I've printed it out and I try to take a detailed look at it 
later today.

But after just a quick pass through it appears that there are a lot of 
potential issues. There seems to be an underlying assumption that a 
productive acre is a productive acre, which simply isn't true. Developed

countries have made capital investments to make acreage specialized and 
more efficient. Minneapolis has a much higher carrying capacity than 
Kenya because of the investments made over the last two centuries to 
provide clean water and sewer, transportation and power. Iowa farm land 
is much more productive than land that is equally rich in Ukraine 
because of the investments made in tillage, irrigation and roads to get 
to markets.

Now if you a quick gut check on this, last year the US imported $1.46T 
US in goods and services, about 14% of GDP, and exported $1.1T US for a 
trade deficit of around $350B US. According to myfootprint the average 
US citizen is using 5.33 times as many acres as we should, yet somehow 
we're able to do it while only spending 0.14 times our overall 
production for imports, and .03 times our total economy for net imports.

If gross undifferentiated acres are the correct resource measurement the

numbers don't simply add up.

BTW, this stuff goes back to Malthus and more recently the Club of Rome 
and Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report in the early '70's. The latter 
predicted that gas would be $100 a gallon by 2000, but in fact the real 
price of gasoline at the pump is about 30% cheaper than it was then and 
it is a much higher quality product that no longer spews lead into the 
environment.

--rick



Ryan Ware wrote:

> Here is a link to the methods behind this
>http://www.unesco.org/mab/brim/workshopdoc/ecological.pdf
>
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=myfootprint.
org+c
>alculations&btnG=Google+Search
>  
>



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