Imprints

About a year ago I came across a book that instantly grabbed my attention.  I am an incredibly visual person and this book makes a huge impact by using over-the-top visuals and graphics.  While children are the target audience for Human Footprint: Everything You Will Eat, Use, Wear, Buy, and Throw Out in Your Lifetime by Ellen Kirk, the book definitely should be shared with any and all.  The book opens by defining your human footprint as "the mark you make on the Earth."  As the book continues, incredible photos magnify how much of what we consume in our lives impacts our planet.  The numbers are startling!

Now, before I am labeled a tree hugger (no offense intended to my arbor enthusiast friends), I want to further explain my interest in the book.  Granted, the statistics are intriguing and most definitely thought provoking, but it is the definition of "human footprint" that struck me.  Not, how much refuse I'm going to produce in my lifetime, but in reality, how much will my imprint impact the people I touch in my short lifetime. 

The past few weeks I have constantly been reminded of this theme.  As I walk my little nutter butter into school each morning and back out of school each afternoon, I often see the sidewalk tracked with the fallen leaves of the age old trees lining her schoolyard. Some of these leaves are trapped to the sidewalk by either a recent rainfall or the early morning dampness of an autumn dew.  The leaves, when moved, have left their exact replica on the sidewalk - their imprint. Maybe I just have mind that works on overdrive, but my instant thought was - how apropos!  Right in front of a school building, where children are impacted daily, I'm being reminded of the importance of imprints.  

Of course, after about a week of saying each day to my youngest-one-of-three, "I've got to bring my camera and get a photo of these leaf prints," I finally did.  An image to remind me, not about how much trash I'm going to leave on this earth, but how much treasure I can leave.  And to quote the book (with a slightly different intent), "Yes, you matter. What you do adds up."

  

Just in case you're curious, here are a few stats from Human Footprint:

• You wore a total of 3,796 diapers when you were a baby.
• Every 3 years, you eat your weight in bread.
• A parade of 28,433 little, yellow rubber ducks shows all the showers you'll take in your lifetime.
• You will drive the equivalent to 25 times around the world.
• You and your fellow Americans throw away 694 plastic bottles a second.
• In a lifetime, you will use 656 bars of soap, 198 bottles of shampoo, 389 tubes of toothpaste, 272 containers of deodorant, and 156 toothbrushes.

I will end with that note of irony - I guess we are really clean, trashy people.