Human Footprint Part 8
Science
The Earth's Human Footprint
Human footprint dot com. Cars get all the bad press, but all forms of modern transportation contribute to the carbon footprint. When our couple leave their car behind, they'll rely on public services and infrastructures. Without even thinking about it, they're plugged into the resources, technology, and ecology of the entire world. Take airplanes, for example. In the USA, there are more domestic flights than any place else on earth.
Atlanta International Airport is the busiest in the world for 2685 planes take off every day. That's one plane either landing or taking off nearly every two seconds. But there are many other airports at any given time there are 5000 airplanes crossing the country. Their vapor trails form heat trapping clouds, allowing excessive carbon dioxide to build up in our atmosphere. A single flight from Seoul South Korea to Washington, D.C., just one of many routes from Asia, produces three and a half tons of carbon emissions. It takes 6 months to produce this much from driving a car. Short flights don't clock up the high mileage, but take offs and landings use up a lot of fuel.
As a nation we amount to 5% of the world's population, yet we consume more than a quarter of the world's energy. This means that the average American's annual carbon footprint exceeds 20 tons. Represented here in weight by this 30 foot long pile of coal. If our carbon dioxide emissions were made into a solid mass of carbon, we would need more than 40 of these trucks to contain the carbon we each generate in a lifetime. 1540 tons of carbon. The amount of carbon dioxide we each generate is 5 times more than the average French man and 20 times more than a person living in India. There are few places left untouched by human beings. It is our nature to spread across the planet. Studies by the WCS, the wildlife conservation society show that 83% of the earth's land is directly influenced by mankind.
The WCS map of our human footprint is clear. If you want to find wild places, then you often have to be prepared to travel to some remote parts of the world. A vacation away from it all means we must head further out into the country. As are couple travel off into the hills, we will see what impact our everyday lives are having on the wildlife and habitats that exist alongside us in the natural world. We've been following the life of an American couple making an impact on the world simply by living in it. As a nation we drive around in 200 million cars and consume raw materials, fuels and minerals. We are consuming resources faster than the earth can replace them. In fact, if everyone in the world lived like we Americans do, we'd need at least four planets to meet our demand for natural resources and absorb our waste and pollution.
As technology evolves at an ever accelerating pace, so does our need to find the materials to keep up with it. This puts pressure on the world's resources. If everyone else used lead at the rate we do, then the 42 year supply that we have left would be cut to just four years. The lifespan of ten reserves vital in the manufacture of a wide range of everyday goods would be cut from 40 years to 8 and a half. Platinum used in the making of scientific equipment is set to run out in 360 years, but if the rest of the world used it as much as we do, then it would all be gone in 21 years. The same is true for many other precious materials, uranium used for weapons and also as a power source would all be gone in just 9 and a half years. But it's not just precious minerals that are being used. Most of our public buildings and the infrastructure that connects them depend on vast quantities of more basic materials. Iron and steel, sand and gravel, cement, and stone.
Our cities and lives would be nothing without them. And if you do the calculations and work out how many buildings we use in our lives, it turns out that each of us uses 1.1 million pounds of these materials in our lifetime. That's 551,000 tons, or the equivalent weight of 6 Washington monuments. Then there's power. To produce electricity, we burn a lot of coal. While we may have huge coal reserves over a lifetime, each of us will require 285 tons of it. For our power needs, as much coal as in this coal yard. Many gadgets we've come to depend upon have an impact on the world's resources, none more so than the cell phone. For all its sophistication, the cell phone has gone from costly miracle device to disposable plaything. 156 million Americans use a cell phone, including nearly 50% of American teenagers. Right now, across the globe, 1.2 billion cell phones are in use. And because new models are always coming out, people throw out 125 million old cell phones.
Each year. Each handset consists of 40% metal, 40% plastics, and 20% ceramics and trace elements. A cell phone is made up of many components. Its brain is a tiny circuit board made from mind raw materials including copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, and a little known naturally occurring mineral called coltan. Coltan, the key ingredient is made up of Colombian and tantalite. Tantalite is a rare, hard, dense metal, very resistant to high temperatures and corrosion and excellent heat and electrical conductor. It's what's enabled our cell phones to become so tiny. But finding these unique materials as an enormous challenge. Our love affair with the cell phone has an impact halfway around the world. 80% of the world's coltan is mined in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.
This territory was the home of gorillas and okapis. Elephants and monkeys, but mining disrupts their habitats as well as attracting poachers and illegal mine operators. The mining of coltan has had human costs as well, as indigenous tribes have been dispossessed and the influx of wealth has helped to fund guerrilla warfare in the region. Even though we may be many miles away from where our cell phones originate, we can each help to lessen the impact. So if everyone recycled their cell phones instead of tossing them, we could reuse precious metals and save resources, wildlife, and even human lives. Our collective human footprints are not only reducing the unspoiled wilderness, they are also changing the environment around our hometowns.
As our children quickly grow up and become adults, they also want to set up home. The demand for construction and services increases, cutting into the countryside. More than 1 million acres of productive farmland and open space gets bulldozed to make way for sprawling development every year in this country, that's two acres of open land, the area behind me disappearing every minute every day. Just look at our towns and cities