File consists of an interview with William Rees titled "Measuring our ecological footprint." The interview was conducted by Silver Donald Cameron as part of The Green Interview. File includes video of the interview, printed transcript, sound recording, and closed captioning file.
From the interview with William Rees: "Well, the ecological footprint is a very simple measure. It is intended to measure one thing, and that is, how big would the little planet required to support just Silver Donald Cameron be? So if you think for a moment-obviously you eat food, you drink water, you deposit waste back into the environment. And if you multiply that by the thousands of products that we consume, each of us, every year, it's quite clear, and we can show this now, but everything we consume has an origin somewhere on the Earth. And every waste that we produce has to be assimilated somewhere on our planet. And for this to happen sustainably, there has to be a continuous capacity to produce the things we consume and to assimilate those things that we waste. So the question for you is, how much land would be needed to grow food? How much to produce the wood fibre that you'd consume? How much is carbon -assimilation land for the carbon dioxide that you would net? And soon and so forth. If you added all that up, that's your personal planetoid. And that becomes, in effect, the footprint you have on the Earth.
"So every one of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, requires a certain land area, a productive ecosystem area. It is producing everything we consume and assimilating the wastes that we produce on a continuous basis, It's an exclusive area, in that the land growing your food can't grow my food; I mean obviously Saskatchewan grows food for a lot of people, but you could apportion it square metre by square metre. The point is, then the ecological footprint is designed simply as a measure of the productive ecosystem area required to sustain any specified population, at any specified material standard. It's the area that the population uses on a continuous basis all over the planet to produce the resources it consumes and to assimilate some of the important wastes."
