How many Earths do you need?

How many Earths would be required if everyone lived like you? That's exactly what Consumer Consequences aims to help you understand. Brought to you by American Public Media and based on research from Redefining Progress, this interactive, online tool is eye-opening, to say the least. The program analyzes your habits and compares that to what the Earth can sustain. Given that the population is currently about 6.6 billion people, each person is alloted 4.5 global acres of biologically productive area. If the way you live requires more than 4.5 global acres and if everyone lived like you, we would need more than one planet to sustain us. You can find out more about the facts on which the game is based.

Try it out. It takes only about 10 minutes to answer a series of questions about your home and the way you consume. Despite my best efforts to reduce my global impact, if everyone lived the way I live, we would need 2.1 Earths to support all 6.6 billion of us. Though I am doing a bit better than the average American, this quick activity helps quantify the disparate nature of the global distribution of wealth and resources.

Need some help getting your score down? Click the links to the right for specific topics, or peruse the posts for general ideas.

Image: http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/