5 Easy Ways To Reduce Your Ecological Footprint
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Updated 2024.07.22
Achieving a minimal ecological footprint is possible. In regards to goods and services, one of the best ways to start is by looking at your commercial activities. Movement and trade around the world is essential to the human experience, it is what progresses the evolution of society, and contributes to our greater sense of connectedness in the world.
When it comes to reducing your ecological footprint, the good news is you will likely continue to operate in trade society. Still it is possible for a person to attain a minimal ecological footprint and retain maximum mutually beneficial relationships, bonds and experiences in commerce.
Before we get into exactly how to reduce your footprint through goods and service usage, it’s important to understand why ecological footprint is important.
Why is ecological footprint important?
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Ecological footprint is a measure of how much of the world’s resources are used by a certain person or organization. You can find out your own ecological footprint estimate at Global Footprint Network’s Footprint Calculator.
The ecological footprint estimate is measured into how many Earths it would take to support you, or said organization, like family or business. It can be higher and lower depending on your personal level of resource usage consumption and is meant to be only a rough estimate based on habits in communities all over the world.
Still, your footprint and how high or low it is can be revealing as to your personal lifestyle habits.
Why is it important to reduce your ecological footprint
Keeping your ecological footprint low is ideal, because it prevents resource overconsumption, which can result in resource depletion or extinction.
When you reduce your ecological footprint, it usually also benefits you and your community. Lowering your footprint keeps the stuff you enjoy here for longer, because it lowers the stress on overall production systems. This allows for resource restoration and regeneration to take place, a natural and necessary part of the consumption cycle, which keeps the Earth’s resources and the populations that contain them abundant and diverse.
Allowing for resource regeneration time keeps the cycles of nature in balance, giving other organisms time to regrow and replenish the reserves of the used resources, maintaining the supply for current and future generations.
Resource overconsumption continues to be the main risk of having a higher ecological footprint. Overconsumption, the result of high resource consumption, can then create an event called a tragedy of the commons.
A tragedy of the commons happens when a public resource vanishes because it is quickly hoarded, and overused, without time to replenish what was taken, thus going extinct and vanishing for all, forever. If everyone on Earth in “the commons,” has a higher ecological footprint, and a resource is over consumed, the risk is that resource vanishes forever.
So reducing your ecological footprint, and knowing roughly what it is, keeps the resources you like and rely on available for you, and others in the community for a longer period of time, perhaps for as long as the human race remains on Earth. To that end, keeping your footprint low is a way to ensure future survival, yours and others.
Now that we have covered the basics, are you ready to start minimizing your ecological footprint?
If so, below are five ways to begin -
5 Easy Ways To Reduce Your Ecological Footprint text overlay Vertical photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels of journal, metal straws, apple, yarn on light wood grain surface -
#1 Shop As Local As Possible
Can you get what you need from local pickup? Driving less reduces your footprint. Shopping local reduces the amount of air, truck, or other type of travel a product needs to take to get to you.
Air travel in particular creates a high amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, giving it a large ecological footprint. The less you need to travel to consume something, the lower the impact the consumption of said object has on the environment.
#2 Bundle - Get It All In One Box, One Bag, One Trip
Bundle your trips by shopping at fewer places. Reduce your visits to the store, your daily amount of available activities, and minimize your time footprint. Use less gas, less packaging and less energy, and still get exactly what you need.
To start this one, think of one of the places you shop the most.
Is there anything you can get there that you need, but also have on your list for elsewhere?
Consider condensing many shopping trips to one or fewer places. Bundling purchases in fewer places also reduces credit card charges, reducing the digital footprint. This one also benefits you in another way - many stores have rewards programs when you spend more with them, so by bundling your purchases you may get more cashback or free items.
#3 Pay Attention To What’s Abundant And Right In Front Of You
Do I already have something similar? Do I have something that would work for this?
Two great questions to ask before expending any additional energy traveling to the store to consume additional goods. If you have a project you want to start, reduce and reuse by identifying resources you can use in and around your environment.
When you pay attention to what is around you locally, and tap into it, by perhaps buying more mushrooms, if you live in mushroom country, or using the paint you already have in the basement before getting a new color, you’ll also feel abundant while reducing your ecological footprint.
What is abundant in your area? Is there a way you can use more of this particular resource? Maximize what is available.
#4 Eat Seasonally
Things being in season usually means they are local and thus travelled less distance to get to your destination. When you buy foods that are coming to harvest in your area right now, not only is your food fresher, it’s often cheaper.
Long cold storage or shipments from other climates can be expensive in terms of energy spent on all ends. More travel, more storage, often also means higher price on all involved.
Eating what’s in season can be easier on your budget’s footprint, as well as the environment’s. You may find that you’re pleasantly surprised by what’s local to you every season, as some areas have farmers markets all throughout the year.
One of the best ways to get a feel for what’s in season near you, is by shopping at your local outdoor farmers market or subscribing to a community share agriculture (CSA) program. With CSA, rather than shopping the market, you subscribe to a farm’s harvest for their market season.
Each farm has a different season, and in a CSA, every week you get a share of what is coming of harvest at that farm, in a box. You pick up your share box usually one day a week throughout the season you’re a subscriber, at a designated location, usually at the farm itself.
Doing it this way, you let the season decide what you’re eating that week. Then, after you practice here, picking out “in-season” foods at the grocery store is often easier and you have a more refined eye for what’s in at the market.
#5 Conserve Power - Reduce Your Electricity And Natural Gas Use
Reduce the heat and bundle up at night in the winter. Turn a light off in a room you aren’t using. Unplug things not in use. Switch off the air conditioning on cool mornings. Using less power, especially if you are on the grid, is most helpful at times when power use is expected to be especially high, like during storms and extreme weather events, such as heat waves or cold snaps.
Through the butterfly effect, using less energy also ultimately leads to fewer power plants needing to exist, fewer extracting demands, resulting in more habitats retained, and more ecological regeneration.
So to recap, five ways to reduce your ecological footprint are:
Vertical photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels of journal, metal straws, apple, yarn on light wood grain surface -
#1 Shop As Local As Possible
#2 Bundle - Get It All In One Box, One Bag, One Trip
#3 Pay Attention To What’s Abundant And Right In Front Of You
#4 Eat Seasonally
#5 Conserve Power - Reduce Your Electricity And Natural Gas Use
If you like to save time and money, reducing your ecological footprint is definitely an activity for you.
One of the things you will notice about reducing your ecological footprint is that many of the techniques for reducing your footprint are often good for your wallet, as well as the environment.
As you reduce your footprint, remember to keep in mind what increases it -
What increases ecological footprint
Resource consumption of natural resources, oil, water, arable land, and consumer goods which derive from these sources, is what increases a person or company’s ecological footprint.
The more that your resource consumption can be streamlined, reduced, recycled, or maximized for your local environment’s offerings, the more your ecological footprint goes down.
Ready to begin reducing your ecological footprint today?
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Great, choose one of the methods above that speaks loudest to you and get started. Just choose one to focus on for a month.
For example, as mentioned in #3 Pay Attention To What’s Abundant And Right In Front Of You, for an entire month, before consuming any new goods or services, ask yourself,
Is there something right here I have that’s similar and can do the job?
Another simple way to begin attaining a minimal ecological footprint is to go through your bank or credit card statements and look at your spending from last month. Take an hour and observe what you consumed for the past 30 days. Tracking financial spending is a very reliable measure of how much consumption you are doing monthly.
Where do you see you is one place you can reduce, bundle, or tap into a more local resource?
You may be able to identify an area of resource consumption that can be simplified, streamlined, and reduced right away. To continue this process, make it a habit to review your spending once a month for a year.
Then, continue to tweak your resource consumption as needed, keeping an eye on it over the seasons, as different environmental conditions may bring new challenges to keeping your consumption levels low. At the end of the year, reassess your footprint using the calculator linked above to see how well you did.
So to end…
If you like a resource, use it in moderation.
Minimizing what you consume can also help you identify what is worth consuming to you, which can help you see very clearly what makes you happy in life.
This also leads to smarter, more fulfilling consumption.
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