5 1/2 Planets

If every person on the planet lived like me, well, just one planet wouldn’t be nearly enough. We’d need not two, not three, not even four planets. We’d need no less than 5 ½ Planet Earths for people living like lil’ ole’ me.

And I thought I was pretty green.

I mean, I recycle! I compost! I bike or take the bus to school! I almost never eat beef! I’m sweating in my wooden sauna of a house right now so that I don’t have to turn on the massive swamp cooler! I’m green, damnit!

But after calculating my carbon footprint, I’m not looking too green anymore. Not even a pale, yellowish green. I’m a bright, obnoxious magenta, the exact opposite of green on the color spectrum wheel.

After reading about Doug Fine’s mission to lead a carbon-neutral life, I wanted to find out how big my own carbon footprint was. Two different online calculators—found at www.footprintnetwork.org (definitely my favorite of the two) and www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator—provided almost the exact same size: the first, 5.5, and the second, 5.4. As in 5.5 planets to “fit” my needs.

Calculating my carbon footprint forced me to pay attention to the facts. Sure, it’s a fact that I almost always bike or take the bus to campus, but it’s also a fact that I drive 880 roundtrip miles to Denver to see my family once or twice a year. It’s also a fact that out of all the times I’ve done group camping in New Mexico, I’ve only carpooled once. Bitterly.

I had to notice things that I don’t normally consider because they’re simply not part of my day-to-day life, like the couple of flights I take every year or the laptop I have to replace every few years. But I also had to notice things that are part of my day-to-day life that I don’t normally think of in terms of environmental impact. When I buy a processed dinner from Trader Joe’s, I’m fully aware that the frozen food is not the best for my health, but I’m somehow less aware of just how detrimental it is to the health of the environment. I think of the personal danger of consuming preservatives in a processed dinner more easily than I think of the environmental danger of consuming gallons of petroleum to get that dinner to my plate. It’s not that the awareness isn’t there at all—it’s that it’s simply not in the foreground of my consciousness. It’s in there somewhere, lounging about in some comfy, dimly lit corner.

Except these carbon footprint calculators have brought it out into the light. That harsh, energy-efficient LED lighting that unforgivingly shows me all of my flaws. 5 ½ planets. That’s not looking too good at all.