There's More Than Carbon In Our Footprint

While we were discussing ecotourism and deforestation in places like Costa Rica, my parents were actually in Costa Rica hiking through and photographing the scenes and phenomena we discussed in class. My dad came home with a camera full of pictures, and as is customary in my family, we all sat down at the computer and scrolled through the hundreds of shots together. Coinidentally, he had taken multiple pictures of the mountains and zoomed way out into the distance to try to capture a phenomenon he didn't understand: acres upon acres of barren terrain. Costa Rica boasts endless green foliage, but as my parents found out, they omit the clear cutting that has occurred to the beautiful forests there for farming, development, and multinationals exploiting the country for its resources. My dad was distraught, and rightly so, because in these pictures, it was obvious that the trees had been cut down many decades ago and yet even more than 50 years later, there had been no regrowth of the foliage. This, like carbon emissions, is something that we have done, and which may be impossible to reverse.

One of the topics we brought up that I couldn't get off my mind was that of palm oil. The image of clear cut rainforests kept surfacing in my thoughts, no thanks to the image of a man biting into an orangutan finger I'm sure. But, although shocking, that was not the image that stayed with me. What affected me most severely was the image of desolate, decaying remnants of forests and the renewed realization that our ecological footprint is much worse than the widely disseminated "carbon footprint" the media is so fond of using. This, like global warming, is an incomplete definition of the changes occurring to our planet, and we must proceed with caution. The Adams article is clear that our fascination with aquariums and the fish within them is altering both the species in the tanks and the environment the tanks are modeled after, by way of people visiting and deteriorating the natural reefs and settings. Oil and pollution are not the only things destroying the planet's natural systems; our collective need to "have the authentic experience" and see animals in their natural habitat is damaging, too. As we saw last week with climate change, the understanding that the earth is not simply warming up has grown, coming to encompass extreme weather as well. This was a small but important distinction to make, and the next one should be the shift from widespread use of "carbon footprint" to "ecological footprint" so that our understanding of the impacts we're having can include all of the disruption we are causing to the planet.

Adams, T. (2013).  A complicated reef: The relationship between the representation and the represented phenomenon.   Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture,7(3),427-433.