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 > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.536 / Virus Database: 331 - Release Date: 11/3/2003 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list