History 106: Assignment 4: What We Don't See

            Some people have come to accept and understand that the food they eat at a restaurant or buy conveniently at a grocery store came from a farm far away; they have acknowledged the fact that consumption of food impacts the world.  It is important for us to remember that nothing is exempt from this fact. We are consumers and when we go out to buy and consume a product, we often don’t know or bother to find out what impact that consumption has on our planet.  William Rees’ ecological footprint is “a measure of human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems” (Davis, “Think Local, Very Local (Your Ecological Footprint)”). Human demand encompasses food as well as everything else that we need or ‘demand’. As an example, we look at a pair of Timberland boots which have a larger ‘ecological footprint’ than the shoe size tag in them.
            We might think that the carbon footprint we leave behind is the amount of gas we consumed driving to the store, but Jeffrey Ball’s article Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints points out that the carbon-footprint of a pair of boots is about 121 pounds. Where did all this come from and how did it all come about? The cartoon provides a brief picture for our examination.

Question: Where did the carbon-footprint come from?

(click to enlarge)

            First, it may be shocking to know that less than 5% of the carbon-footprint was actually from transportation. While it was necessary for the product to become accessible to us, the larger portion of the footprint came from how the boots were made. Second, according to Ball, Timberland’s factory in China’s Guangdong province contributes only 8.5 pounds of the 121 total.  While the factories might be consuming coal in its production of the boots, they also only accounts for a fraction of the carbon footprint.
            The 112.5 pounds comes from the raw materials that go into the boots: rubber, ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA), and leather (Ball, n. pag). Of these raw materials, leather is the biggest factor mainly because of the cows.  Ball points to the methane the cows produce which is a more damaging  gas to the atmosphere and can add up to the equivalent of four tons of carbon dioxide.

Question: How did this carbon-footprint happen?

            The short answer is because we wanted something – demand.  Resources were spent to give us what we were willing to pay for. Due to the demand of the boots, producers were paid enough to pay farmers enough to provide cows and other raw materials.  Therefore to dig deeper to the ‘how’ carbon footprints like this happened, we actually need to look at ourselves and the source of our demand.

The source of our seemingly endless consumption can arguably be a fruit of the industrial revolution and a by product of the progression of energy regimes. The industrial revolution helped humans harness different energies for work and allowed production to increase thereby also increasing personal wealth. The world was also made smaller as both humans and goods can travel distances in shorter periods of time.

All these changes led to the convenience of being able to get anything we want as consumers almost immediately.  Our changed view of demand resulted in a market economy which “turned natural resources into commodities … [leading] people to think of natural goods in increasingly abstract and uniform terms” (Davis, “Modernity and the Environment”). When we see the Timberland boots, we don’t see what went into the boots; we see only that it is right in front of us. The price tag is only cost we have become concerned about.

Ball, Jeffrey. “Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints.” Wall Street Journal Mar. 2009. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.

Davis, Brandon, et al. “Think Local, Very Local (Your Ecological Footprint).” History 106. Unit 1, Module   3. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. April 2. 2012. Online lecture.

Davis, Brandon, et al. “Modernity and the Environment” History 106. Unit 3, Module 6. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. April 4. 2012. Online lecture.