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going wild for a beautiful world
The “Organic Way” magazine estimates that only around 2% of an average household’s carbon footprint was generated in the garden, a figure lower than expected due to the large scale buying in of organic composts and fertilisers rather than the use of homegrown products. The use of composted green manures would fix more nitrogen on site and would reduce the carbon footprint significantly. However, growing your own produce had a decrease in the ecological footprint of around 13% as compared to buying in the equivalent quantities of fruit and vegetables.
Other factors that have a large impact on footprint are the use of machinery such as mowers and other power tools and the use of weed killers and pesticides which are energy intensive in manufacture and transport.
The National Trust, English Heritage and as far back as 2001, the Royal Horticultural Society gardens to name but a few have implemented measures to reduce their footprint. These include converting grass to meadow areas to reduce mowing, biological pest control, the reduction of fertilisers, the insulating of its greenhousing and installing more efficient boilers where required, greater composting and turning to traditional techniques such as water-harvesting from roof guttering. One novel approach used plant capping rather than concrete to stop water from
Footprints Explained
A Carbon Footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide or CO2 that your life produces and is closely related to the amount of energy and resources you consume. It gives an estimate of the likely impact on climate change.
An Ecological footprint, though more difficult to calculate, is more useful in evaluating the resources necessary for physical survival. It represents the land area in global hectares (gh) that an individual needs to draw on to support his lifestyle in terms of food, water catchment, resources to obtain fuel etc.
Both the above are measures of impact on the environment.
In 2007, the national average carbon footprint came out as 10.9 tonnes CO2 consumed per person annually in the UK As an ecological footprint, this equates to a requirement of 3.4 planets per person!
seeping into walls. Kew started in 2004 to work towards to the International Standard for Environmental Management or ISO 14001 which obliged them to analyse their total impact.
Naturally, for best results, energy saving gardening activities need to be performed as part of a package of life measures. Domestic gardens only account for less than 0.3m tonnes of annual CO2 emissions, compared to 1.19 million tonnes of CO2 by British agriculture and horticulture, yet a staggering 4 million tonnes are lost by domestic appliances on standby alone! Also, long-distance flying dwarfs any other measure to reduce footprint size.
In summary, critical as all these measures are to wildlife, the impact on overall carbon footprint is almost negligible when compared to home energy use. The environmental footprint is a more reliable indicator, together with the achievement of a garden thriving with biodiversity.
