How big is your footprint?
A person’s “ecological footprint” is a measurement of their impact on nature. The average American uses thirty acres to support his or her current lifestyle—that’s thirty football fields put together. In comparison, the average Canadian lives on a footprint one-third smaller, and the average Italian on 55% less.
How much can nature provide? With a global population of over six billion, nature provides an average of five acres of bioproductive space for every person in the world. When the population grows to ten billion, the available space will be reduced to three acres. This should also give room for at least twenty-five million other species. Already, humanity’s footprint may be over 30% larger than our fair share.
What can we do? We can become part of the sustainability movement and make it possible for everybody to secure their quality of life within the means of nature.
From “How Big Is Your Footprint?” Population Coalition, http://www.popco.org/irc/footprint
Loan man
Muhammad Yunus is the world’s best-known social entrepreneur. Thirty-some years ago, he was a young professor of economics in his native Bangladesh. He was driven to find a way to convince banks to give loans to the poorest people in his country. He was thought to be mad. The poor have no collateral, he was told. Loaning them money is folly. They will never be able to pay you back. So Yunus decided to start a bank for the poor. The first loan was for about 30 US dollars. Today millions, women in particular, have been able to pull themselves out of poverty thanks to the Grameen Bank. The Grameen Bank was the first micro-lending institution in the world. Today, microcredit is mainstreamed even into the most conservative institutions. Yunus changed forever the myth that being poor was synonymous with being a high-risk investment. Grameen’s repayment rate over the years has been between 95 and 98%. Other micro-finance institutions across the world that emulated Grameen report the same returns.
Land man
Roy Prosterman had a rising career with one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in New York City. Initially, he found the work fascinating. But, increasingly disheartened by the expenditure of vast sums of money by corporations on legal fees to defend their interests against consumers, he left the firm, and at the invitation of the University of Washington, started teaching. Soon thereafter, Prosterman came upon a law review article about land reform in Latin America that changed his life forever. Inspired by a new life mission, Prosterman founded the Rural Development Institute (RDI) on a shoestring. Its objective was to reform the rural land policies of the world’s poorest countries so that farmers could gain land ownership.
Today, Prosterman, a true social entrepreneur, is 65 years old. He has been working in land reform for 35 years, focused on building legal capacity in the 35 countries that have sought his help. Because of RDI, 70 million farmers have received land ownership to about 62 million acres, close to 2% of the world’s arable land.
