Online

http://www.myfootprint.org

What's your Ecological Footprint?

Most of us know that the way we live -- our food, the size of the house we live in, the energy we use up or what we buy -- uses up the earth's resources and generates waste. But to find out exactly how sustainable our lifestyles really are, we can now just log onto the Internet. Ecological footprint calculators, in a simple quiz, use responses to calculate if and how one is using more than one's share of ecological space.

The Ecological Footprint Quiz on Myfootprint.org is the first of its kind on the Internet. It takes the surfer through a set of 16 questions. These range from the consumption pattern to how one gets around. It then calculates his or her ecological footprint. The result -- often disturbing -- is depicted in terms of the number of earths required to sustain the quiz taker's lifestyle and calls for reducing consumption to levels sustainable by the only earth we have.

Myfootprint.org doesn't stop at telling the viewer how much of a problem the lifestyle is causing. It goes on to suggest simple changes, such as eating less meat, or refraining from purchasing disposable items, that enable him to reduce his ecological footprint. The website also provides a calculator, which allows one to set a target to reduce one's ecological footprint by using a combination of goals. One can experiment with a combination of goals to arrive at the desired reduction target. In doing so, the calculator, besides creating awareness about consumption patterns, also serves as a campaign to encourage more sustainable behaviour.

The calculator was jointly developed by two American non-profit organisations in the us -- the Earth Day Network, an international group of organisations that aims to broaden the environmental movement, and Redefining Progress, which networks with other partners to shift economic and public policy towards sustainability.

With its user-friendly interface -- such as the scroll-over world map that allows you to select your country and language, simple questions like the number of times one eats animal-based products in a week or the distance one travels in a week using different modes of transport -- the calculator is easy and a lot of fun to go through! What's more, people from 49 countries can take the quiz in any one of seven languages, making it universally applicable.

So log on. And start thinking about what you can do .