Small Footprint - Green Event Planning

We have become a society that truly believes “bigger is Better” and “more” should be our goal. If we want to reduce our carbon footprint that sort of thinking needs to become history.

In the U.S.big houses are becoming the norm. Its time to ditch the McMansions. Oversize homes aren’t just architecturally offensive, they also require more energy to heat and cool as well as consume a greater amount of building materials. Many countries around the world have been practicing smaller living for decades living in vastly smaller average homes as well as pioneering green building practices. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program measures a building’s planet-friendly factor based on five criteria:

Sustainable site development

Water savings

Energy Efficiency

Material selection

Indoor environmental quality

Residential energy use accounts for 16% of greenhouse-gas emissions. You need to begin thinking green at the blueprint stage so low-tech, pragmatic techniques will maximize your new home’s efficiency. You don’t need 24th century solutions to 18th century problems.

Small is beautiful, in our homes, our hobbies, our transportation, our entire lifestyle. We need to model our thinking and philosophy on the Buddhist thinking, Live simply, meditate often, consume less and think more. The planet will applaud you!

     We depend on nature. This is an obvious but profound statement. Nature provides us with all of our life-support systems, it is the very source of our lives and well-being. But since much of the world lives in cities and consume goods imported from all over the world we tend to view nature as merely a place for recreation or a collection of commodities there for our consumption.

      If we are to lessen our ecological footprint and live sustainably we have to be sure we use the essential products and processes of nature no more quickly than they can be renewed and we discharge wastes no more quickly than they can be absorbed. But as they stand today our current demands on nature are compromising humanity’s future well-being. Society still views nature as an expendable part of our economy. Our over-harvesting and waste generation reduce future productivity and may well lead to eco-system collapse.

     The ecological footprint is an accounting tool that allows us to estimate the resource consumption and waste requirements of a specific population or economy in terms of a corresponding productive land area. The economy is similar to a horse in a pasture. The horse and the economy need to consume resources which eventually will become waste and will have to leave the horse or the economy. So the question becomes how much pasture is necessary to support that horse, or economy, to produce all its feed and absorb all its waste? At our current standard of living if everybody lived like today’s North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support. And still our ecological footprint keeps growing!