My Ecological Footprint after 10 weeks

I reduced my ecological footprint by .5 earths! I'm now at 3.5 planets, when my original footprint was 4 planets shown here (Original Footprint). 

I set for myself 7 goals to reduce my footprint this quarter and I think I did a fine job achieving these goals. Even though I did reduce my footprint by a half-an-earth, I almost expected a little more of a difference in my end results compared to the amount of effort I put in to changes my daily habits... But I guess it makes sense that it must take a huge altering life change in order to make a significant difference. 

Due to winter almost at it's end, and spring approaching quickly, it was a natural process to achieve my goal of turning down the heat, not only at night but during the day as well. I'm assuming our thermostat will progressively go down in temperature until fall picks up again. So that goal should remain in effect for the next 6 months or so. 

Compared to earlier in the quarter, I have been driving a lot less. I used to work down in Seattle on the weekends, requiring me to drive bath and forth all the time, racking up the miles. But over the past 6 weeks, I haven't been traveling down south at all. This goal might be a hard one to continue, considering spring break is coming up and I will be driving around a lot more often, and also more activities are coming up in the spring that will require me to drive down to the Seattle area once again. But luckily my car gets great gas mileage and I'll try my best to carpool!

As far as my eating habits and food choices go, I feel like I made some slight changes. I don't usually eat a lot of meat anyways, so reducing that wasn't a huge deal for me. But I did make a point to buy locally grown produce and becoming slightly addicted to organic fuji apples. Considering I live two blocks away from the Downtown Co-op, I've been shopping there a lot more recently, despite how costly some goods are. I think it's worth the extra money. This is a goal I think I'll be able to continue easily. Knowing that I'm eating less packaged food, and more locally grown products has made me feel a lot healthier and better about what I'm eating. 

Lastly, my more ambitious goal was to reduce my showers by 3 mins. This one was more difficult than I expected...and most of the time I would forget how long I was in there. Thinking about it, I have been running late in the mornings recently, in which I hurry through my showers as fast as possible... so that might have made a slight difference. I'm still going to continue to try and take faster showers and reduce the amount of water consumption in other various ways.

:)