Who are Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees, the Authors of Ecological Footprint?
Bill Rees is a Professor and Director of the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. Mathis Wackernagel works with the Earth Council in Costa Rica (may have been a student of Rees’s?) They were concerned with the problem of quantifying sustainability issues. The challenge is to convert consumption to a measureable quantity, for which they chose “land area”. Wackernagel and Rees suggest that we think of an economy (e.g., of a city, Figure 1.3) as having an “industrial metabolism”, like a cow in a pasture. Like a cow, the economy “eats” resources and produces waste that has to leave (the economy). Figuratively, how big a pasture is needed to support that economy–to both feed it AND absorb its waste. The average North American Footprint is 4-5 hectares (9-12.5 acres, or about 3+ city blocks.) THAT IS PER PERSON! The problem is that our (North American) required footprint has grown from about 1 hectare in 1900 to over 4 hectares in 2000. But because of population increases and d
