I was shocked yesterday when I asked my 70-something mom if she was planning to replace her aging car anytime soon, and she said she'd like to get a hybrid. She is also interested to move from a large house in Shaker to a smaller condo in University Circle, so she can live near what she values most in the community. She wants to minimize her ecological footprint on Earth, while she is still here to help. While mom is a progressive, she has not previously been nearly so concerned about her individual impact on the environment. This is progress!

We need better environmentalist role models in the community, including 70-something grandmothers. And we must make examples of high-profile ecological offenders, from individual GEM employees, managers, executives and shareholders who just contaminated the region, to the Hummer driver with the "ENVYME" license plate who is so offensive to all man-woman-and-childkind. The media and ecological frontlines are great places to begin - community leaders should investigate their negative impact on our environment, champion social responsibility, change behavior when appropriate, and step forward as positive role models, if they may.

There is an easy way for folks to benchmark social responsibility, by measuring your ecological footprint on Earth... go to http://myfootprint.org/ and complete a two minute, 15 question quiz (share your results as comments here). The results tell you how many of the Earth's biologically productive acres of land are required to support your consumption of resources, and how many planet Earths would be required to sustain the world if everyone lived like you. Read on...

To put the outcomes in perspective, at the Futures Forum in 2004, EcoCity director David Beach confided we need 26 acres to sustain his lifestyle (and he considers himself
a good ecological citizen), and if everyone on earth lived the way he does we'd need 6 planets for all the Earth's citizens.... see comlete write up here. Go to http://myfootprint.org/ and take the survey and let us know your results as a comment here... for now, let's just gather some perspectives... ASAP, I'd like to formalize this into a very public NEO community stakeholder social responsibility benchmarking initiative. I'll post my footprint, will you?