17th January 2021
Three years ago, I made the prompt decision to cut meat from my diet based on one statistic about beef's water footprint. The fact that 1 kg of beef took the water equivalent of 50 showers to produce was terrifying to me, and I felt I had no choice but to opt out.
The concept of "footprint reduction" defines much of today's environmental discourse. In order to be responsible human beings, we are told to tread as light as we can on the sands of Earth. We meticulously calculate the resources "consumed" by our daily actions, hoping that the resulting numbers would scare the world away from our current course of action. And of course, that was exactly what got me into environmentalism — I can't lie, the footprint narrative is vivid.
Yet, it also paints a rather depressing story about humanity — one where our very existence is destructive. After all, if every single action comes with an ecological footprint, and to be ethical is to minimise the said footprint, wouldn't suicide become the greenest thing to do? While few people take the mindset to such a dark extreme, the hint that we can't live without causing destruction is part of what makes environmentalism so difficult. We weren't built to shrink ourselves — that is against our evolutionary instinct. Most people respond to footprint numbers with genuine horror, but that horror often translates to paralysation rather than positive change.
There has to be a different story.
Framing the ecological crisis as a matter of "human footprint on Earth" reinforces the very human-nature dichotomy that got us here in the first place. For centuries, we have sought to draw clean lines between what's human and what's not, ruthlessly capitalising off the former, rhetorically "conserving" the latter. Now that we realise there's no such thing as purely belonging to humans, we are scrambling for an alternative way to exist. We hold a rosy vision for a "zero footprint" world where human society (and capitalism) could thrive almost independently from the planet. But let's face it — no human activity can ever occur without planetary implications, it's just biophysically impossible. Even the IPCC's vision of a zero carbon economy relies heavily on carbon capture fantasies. Unless we find a planet B, everything we do will inevitably impact planet A.
But "impact" doesn't have to mean "destruction".
Though the term "ecological footprint" is often brought up in circularity conversations, it only makes real sense in the linear economy. The Global Footprint Network literally describes their work as accounting "the demand on and supply of nature", as if the Earth were a resource factory with outputs for human "consumption". But what does it even mean to "consume" resources in a circular economy, where resources used are revitalised rather than destroyed?
The fact that consumption, in today's sense of the word, ought to decline is undebatable. Given the hyper linear models in which all of our industries operate, to shift towards a circular economy would mean to reduce all consumption, period. Yet in the long term, this isn't a road towards zero or minimised consumption as much as it is a movement towards a changed model of consumption. After all, nobody wants a future where opting for avocado over tofu is an environmental sin, even though its water footprint is 3 times higher. There is a much healthier balance that the footprint minimisation framework fails to convey.
As human beings continue to march through the sands of time, we will inevitably leave a trail of footprints that will define the way future generations see the world. Rather than telling the world to tread lightly and cautiously, perhaps we could change our shoes and dance our hearts out on this Earth — but in a regenerative way that allows our future generations to look back in pride.
And when their time comes, they shall dance on the same sands too.
