We just got done watching The Human Footprint on TV. It was pretty interesting. The sheer magnitude of stuff that each of us consumes in a lifetime is pretty staggering.
We thought that some of the numbers cited by the show were probably accurate, but for other numbers and figures we were a little bit confused. For example, the show tells us that the average American consumes around 563 cans of soda per year Yow! That's a huge amount, and significantly more than an order-of-magnitude more than what we consume.
The show was a little bit monotonous at times, but overall, it was a good reminder that anything we can do to reduce, reuse, or recycle is a very good thing. Actually, it is more than a "good thing" because if everybody on the planet consumed the way the average American does, we'd need four planet Earths for all of the resources that would be consumed. Clearly, this level of consumption isn't sustainable.
