Unit 3: Week 4: Activity 2
Calculating and Comparing Your Transportation Footprint.
Summary: Students consider the implications of different forms of transportation, and the difficulties of calculating a transportation footprint.
Materials:
Activity Steps:
1. Warm-up: How do we travel (bus, train, car, other) during the week? How many people drive together? How do we get to school? Where do we travel after school? Where do we travel on weekends? How do you go? Summarize your patterns of transportation.
2. Trends: What are some trends in transportation? Brainstorm how transportation might be changing. See ideas of Transportation Trends.
3. Consider: What do you think happens when.... someone drives a car or a plane?
Make a drawing of a car and all the things that happens when it travels down a road. Make a RESULTS OF DRIVING list. Try not to consult the As We Travel page until the class is no longer coming up with new ideas.
4. Consider the example of Mexico City. There, cars contibute so heavily to smog over the city that everyone has some days they cannot drive.
Discovery: http://www.tlc.discovery.com/news/earthalert/990111/smogmexico.html
5. How do you figure out the costs of driving?
Go over your RESULTS OF DRIVING list again. To which factors can you easily assign costs and why would we care about costs? [ In order to find the answer to this, set an extreme example in which it was EXTREMELY costly to use a car.]
Which costs are harder to calculate? For example, we know the cost of gasoline in our neighborhood, so that should be easy. Calculating the costs of air pollution, however, requires extensive research into health and environmental statistics, so that would be hard. Calculating the results of climate change is much harder still. Make two lists: Easy to Calculate Costs and Hard to Calculate Costs. Ask each other, should we just ignore the hard to calculate items, or do our best to assign numbers to them?
6. One way to calculate the costs: the Environmental Footprint
Now you are in a position to appreciate the work of some others who have been developing "footprints" of human activties. Transportation is an important part of the Human "Footprint" on this planet.
"The ecological footprint of the average Canadian adds up to 4.8 hectares. This is the total amount of land required for food, housing, transport, consumer goods and services. Energy is a large component of the footprint: some 2.9 hectares are necessary for the long term provision of a biological substitute for fossil fuels. The second largest component at 1.1 hectare is agriculture for food supply and consumer goods. Forestry takes up 0.6 hectare to supply the fibre for housing and consumer goods. Finally, the built environment takes up 0.2 hectares for housing and transport." http://www.ire.ubc.ca/ecoresearch/ecoftpr.html
The site for Redefining Progress includes a page comparing footprints among nations.
One way to figure costs is to change everything into a common denominator, something like good land for growing trees that breathe in the CO2 that cars breathe out, or land it takes to grow the grains that give you energy to ride a bike.
cars :
1442 square meters of ecologically productive land for CO2 gathering -in.
bus:
301 sq meters of ecologically productive land for CO2 sequestration [BUT it carries more people at a time.]
bicycles:
fuel x commuter days
nutrition x land to produce the fuel
= 122 sq meters of ecologically productive land to grow cereal
What about when you walk?
7. Download the latest version of the Footprint Calculator and explore your transportation profile.
Extension: Think about what this means Per Person.
References:
Ecological Footprints of Nations is a Rio+5 report prepared by Mathis Wackernagel and colleagues which compares the ecological impact of 52 large nations.
http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/rio/focus/report/english/footprint/
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