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How Many Earths

Jeevesh Konuru

9/30/10

Mrs. Scott

Essay

How Many Earths?

 

            How many earths does it require in order to sustain the entire human population in a manner just like I live? That is the question that is responded to in the software/game ‘How Many Earths’. The software/game asks various questions such as the amount gas, electricity, food, and beverages are consumed and used every week. After processing the information it tell you how many earths it would take to support the rest of the world if they lived just like you. Finally it shows the categories that most affected your result. I found this to be extremely enlightening, and show’s you the places where you should improve in order to be less of a weight to the environment. The thing that surprised me the most was the amount of toll the earth was taking just to support one of the many species of animal alive. I never would have suspected the toll the earth was taking, before I found out that it would take 4.6 earths if everybody lived just like me. The areas that I consumed the most were transportation, and food. The high number in transportation was due to my dad flying often for business reasons. Another reason is because the only times don’t take the car out is when we are going to school. In every other transportation situation we go in the car. For example, when we are going to sculling practice, which is only 1 mile away, we take the car out. In order to improve this we should take longer, but less frequent flights. We should also only take the car out when completely necessary. For example, if we are going to sculling practice, or even going to the beach, we should take our bikes out, instead of going my car in order to avoid making such a big impact on the environment. The high impact from food was because of wastage of food, and coffee. We do not go through any other beverages, except for a lot of coffee. My parents in total have four cups of coffee a day, which is 28 cups a week. Overall that is a lot of coffee, which is a cash crop. Cash crops are mostly grown in big corporations, thus uses a lot of pesticides to create. All those pesticides end up taking a large toll on the environment. The wastage of food is because of the quantity of packaged goods we consume every week. In order to fix this we should cut down on the high consumption of coffee. Or we could find an alternative source of coffee that does not use pesticides in there crops. In order to fix the amount of packaged items thrown out we could try to find more bio-degradable alternative packaging or foods overall. It takes 4.7 earths to sustain everybody if they lived like me. Even though it would be fine if we had that many earths we only have one. So in order to fix this, I will take what I learned from completing this game and reduce my impact on the earth.

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