Page 44 - BBC Focus - August 2017

OPINION

customers they supply. The leather footprint is the
LEFT: More
productive farm on which the cow lived, plus the various
farms could abattoirs and factories that processed the leather,
lead to less
land being again divided by the number of people who were
taken from supplied. Broadly speaking, the farm dwarfs the
nature
other footprints because it takes several acres of
grazing per cow and therefore per customer. In the
case of fuel, the energy density of an oil well, in
Watts per square metre, is thousands of times
higher than that of a woodland.
It is no accident that wolves are increasing, lions
decreasing and tigers holding their own: wolves
live in rich countries, lions live in poor countries
and tigers live in middle-income countries.
The opposite theory to IPAT is ‘sustainable
intensification’, also known as eco-modernism:
the idea that the more productive we make our
farms, mines and factories, the less we need to
purloin from wild nature. Thanks to irrigation and
fertiliser, including the effect of extra carbon
dioxide on global greening, humankind increases
2 the number calculated by the Global Footprint the productivity of many parts of the planet, even
Network, which defines the ecological footprint as as we pinch a big chunk of that productivity for
“A measure of how much biologically productive our own needs. It is therefore possible to imagine
land and water an individual, population or that a century or two hence we could have nine or
activity requires to produce all the resources it ten billion prosperous people on Earth, but just as
consumes and to absorb the waste it generates much forest and wildlife as if we were not here at
using prevailing technology and resource all. We might even have brought extinct species
management practices.” In short, we are back. If we can read the genome of Steller’s sea
consuming the Earth’s store of food, fuel and fibre cow from its bones, then we might be able to
1.4 times as fast as it can be replenished. But upon revive it.
BELOW: Our
examination this number is misleading, almost to population is
the point of dishonesty. More than half of it increasing, but
consists of the land that would be needed by each that doesn’t Matt Ridley is a Conservative peer in the House of Lords.
have to be bad
person to plant trees with which to absorb their news for the He is also a columnist for The Times, economist and author.
own carbon emissions. If you take the view that planet His family leases land for coal mining in Northumberland.
we can cut emissions, or find better ways to
sequestrate them, or even cope with at least some
increase in them, then the footprint shrinks and
we are living well within our ecological means.
Environmentalists use a formula called IPAT:
impact = population x affluence x technology. The
more people there are, and the richer they are and
the more technology they have, the more damage
they do to the environment. But this cannot be
right. Human impact has been decreasing in rich
countries as a result of new technology.
For example, by switching from organic to
inorganic resources (diesel instead of hay;
concrete and glass instead of wood; plastic instead
of leather), we reduce our footprint – that is to say,
the amount of land the average person needs to
support their lifestyle. By using new technology
we shrink our requirement for land and water.
Let’s compare a person who has plastic seats in
their car, say, with someone who has leather seats.
The plastic footprint is the area occupied by the
oil well, the refinery, the plastic factory, the car
factory and so on, divided by the number of

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