Who would you condsider had a smaller ecological footprint and who would have a bigger and why?

Answer 1

Poverty = no pollution is not true. Pollution is happening everywhere and it is not limited to the wealthy people. Poverty does cause pollution: waste and water pollution. They don't have the necessary technologies to properly dispose or treat the waste produced. Nothing is done to clean up the dirty water used by them and their rubbish are piled up somewhere and it gets bigger everyday. Even so, their ecological footprint is nothing compared to the weathy people.

In my opinion, people that can live sustainably are those who have smaller ecological footprint. Imagine a packed city with sufficient land for agriculture and waste sinks just outside the city; those people would have a smaller ecological footprint. They don't need to go far to get their resources and they are living in a packed area where minimal usage of land per person is required. That is ideal situation.

My class have taken the ecological footprint test and I noticed that those people who have bigger ecological footprint are those people who are frequent traveler. Traveling by plane is the major contributor to the big ecological footprint but cars also significantly increases the footprint size. People live in poverty does not have excess to such luxury it is the wealthy people that tends to have bigger footprint.

People who is sharing tend to have a smaller footprint size. That is why in a packed area, you normally would have smaller ecological footprint size people. The ultimate key to smaller ecological footprint is to live sustainably.

Answer 2

Rich people have a large footprint and poor people have a small one. Any poor rice farmer in the third world has a MUCH smaller footprint than Al Gore for example. There is a direct correlation between income and ecological footprint. That poor rice farmer has no car, never flies in a plane, and hardly ever buys manufactured goods that took resources to make and transport.

These are the equations that the environmental extremists deny:
wealth = pollution
poverty = no pollution

Yet I still see them asking us to give up wealth to save the planet, so they know these equations are true.