SENCER Pearls of Practice
A gem of
an idea!
How Big Is My Footprint? Climate change is a complex problem that’s often
challenging for students to engage with because of
perceived long time horizons and impacts seemingly
concentrated in faraway places. In this activity, students
filter and reconstruct the concepts of climate change and
ecological footprints through their personal frame of
reference, using an ecological footprint exercise to quantify
the environmental impact of their lifestyle. They bring
knowledge of physics and chemistry to bear on the
social/environmental/economic issue of climate change,
and, conversely, they deepen their understanding of the mitigation of and adaptation to climate
change by advancing their knowledge of the key scientific concepts involved.
Once students have brought the notions of climate change and ecological footprints into their
personal spheres, they can link their individual impact to the collective impact of their
neighborhoods, cities, or nation as a whole. The ecological footprint exercise brings visibility to
some environmental consequences of their lifestyles that are otherwise invisible.
Courses into which this activity could fit 
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Environmental science
Science, technology, and society
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Conservation psychology
Introduction to psychology
Social psychology
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Microeconomics
Sociology
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
Scientific concepts addressed and related civic issues This activity connects students’ understanding of the civic issues of the negative impacts of
anthropogenic climate change on human mental and physical health with the scientific concepts
of an ecological footprint (the demands placed by humanity on nature), the biocapacity
(biologically productive land areas) of the Earth, and the laws of physics. What does scientific
consensus on anthropogenic climate change look like? Do we have such consensus? What type
of consensus should we wait for before taking action? Students’ considering this connection
paves the way for their study of the relationship between science and public policy.
This activity draws students to connect anthropogenic climate change to the laws of physics,
specifically, the energy constraints imposed by the laws of thermodynamics. Given this, students
must ask themselves whether the push for growth and development seeks to defy the laws of
physics. The realization that humans are living beyond the limits of the biosphere prompts
students to more deeply contemplate the role of human behavior in ensuring a sustainable future.
One can launch this discussion by addressing motivation to change. Is ecological footprint
feedback a sufficient motivator to change behavior? Why or why not?
In addition, depending on which readings the instructor incorporates, this activity examines proenvironmental behavior and connections between this type of engagement with a major civic
issues and the concept of self-worth. Students consider the well-studied notion of “contingencies
of self-worth”: domains of life in which people believe they must succeed in order to be worthy
(see Brooks, 2011). Researchers have found that after individuals receive negative feedback
about their ecological footprints, those with relatively higher scores on a scale showing
environmental contingencies of self-worth are more likely to engage in pro-environmental
behavior. In contrast, the opposite effect emerges for those with lower scores. That is, people
who do not base their self-esteem on environmentalism are less likely to behave in a proenvironmental fashion after receiving negative ecological footprint feedback.
The activity Climate change is one outcome of humanity’s overuse of the Earth’s resources, and the
ecological footprint exercise enables students to study how humanity relates to the ecosphere by
quantifying the impact of extracting and processing the materials that they use, either directly or
indirectly. The ecological footprint analysis takes into account the land area required to generate
the resources that humans consume and assimilate the waste associated with consumption;
therefore, ecological overshoot is an inevitable outcome. Collectively, the footprints of the
people in a college classroom in the United States will exceed the biocapacity of the Earth many
times over.
This activity relies upon guided discovery, asking students to select relevant information,
organize it into a coherent structure, and integrate it with other organized knowledge.
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
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Before coming to class, students complete an ecological footprint quiz
(http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/) wherein they
answer questions centered on food, housing, and transportation. The quiz permits
respondents to choose between two response formats: basic or detailed information; I
encourage students to provide detailed information. Students bring their results to class
(see sample results below).
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
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At the beginning of class, students anonymously report their footprint results—the
number of “planet Earths” it takes to meet an individual’s resource demands and absorb
associated wastes on an annual basis.
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Working in small groups, students generate responses to the following prompts:
o How much control do you have over the size of your ecological footprint?
(Perceived behavioral control is an important predictor of behavioral intentions
and actual behavior. The more control people perceive that they have over a given
behavior, the more likely they are to engage in it.)
o Discover your relative footprint size. First, analyze classroom-level data. What
does the distribution look like? Next, compare the class’s average footprint to the
national averages (see the “footprint for nations” area under “footprint basics” in
the quiz).
o What are the implications of reducing footprint size for a person’s quality of life?
Is pro-environmental behavior likely to compromise happiness?
o Are any variables missing from the ecological footprint assessment?
(This gets at whether students perceive the ecological footprint exercise as a
legitimate tool. If they perceive it as incomplete in some way, they are more likely
to reject or deny their results.)
o What is the connection between a person’s knowledge of her ecological footprint
and her pro-environmental behavior?
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
(Encourage students to take into account the figure on page 122 of Brooks (2011)
showing how environmental contingency of self-worth moderates the relationship
between ecological footprint feedback and pro-environmental behavior.)
o Which pro-environmental behaviors are the most important to target to address
climate change? Construct an ordered list of specific pro-environmental behaviors
such that the most important behaviors (those that are the biggest offenders in
ecological-footprint terms) receive top priority.
(The intention is that students select a behavior from this list to target during their
subsequent self-change project.)
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Optional: After the class period, students submit a proposal for their self-change project,
a project wherein students commit to monitoring a specific pro-environmental behavior.
The context for self-change is thus grounded in the ecological footprint exercise.
Opportunities for service-learning
In courses with a service-learning component, students can guide community members through
the footprint quiz and can create learning aids to be distributed once community members
receive their footprint results. For instance, my students worked with a local church’s “Green
Team” to survey members of the congregation and devise strategies for helping the congregation
set energy-reduction targets and monitor progress toward its goals.
Time line 1. The core of the Pearl can be completed in a 50- or 75-minute class period.
2. Students must do some of out-of-class work on the front end prior to the in-class
discussion (approximately 15 minutes completing the quiz and interpreting one’s results).
Prior knowledge required Students must have some knowledge of their consumption patterns, for example, the fuel
mileage of their vehicle, the square footage of their living space. They need no prior knowledge
of the scientific or social/civic concepts addressed.
Materials needed 
Internet access (see
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/)
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Two background readings:
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
o Brooks, A. 2011. Ecological footprint feedback: Motivating or discouraging?
Social Influence, 6(2), 113-128.
o Gardner, G. T., & Stern, P. C. 2008. The short list: The most effective actions
U.S. households can take to curb climate change. Environment 50, 13-24.
Context and concepts for instructors 
Students will likely inquire about your (the instructor’s) ecological footprint. I disclose mine
(acknowledging that it varies depending upon how much time I spend in the sky!), but realize
that not all instructors may be comfortable sharing this information.
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Students often report dismay over the size of their footprints, and they underestimate the
extent to which their footprint results will generate an emotional response. The instructor can
actively bring this to center stage by asking students to describe their emotional reactions to
the footprint feedback, and this paves the way for the incorporation of Amara Brooks’ work
linking ecological footprint feedback to pro-environmental behavior (see additional
resources, below).
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After initially receiving their ecological footprint results, some students begin trying to game
the system by retaking the quiz and entering the lowest possible response to each of the
questions. Be prepared to discuss why it’s impossible to go below a certain outcome (i.e., a
certain number of Earths) because individual-level footprint results are extrapolated from
national footprint accounts.
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Why this footprint quiz rather than another? The ecological footprint exercise is a more
comprehensive measure of resource consumption than a carbon footprint quiz (e.g.,
http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/carboncalculator). Whereas a carbon footprint quiz focuses
upon the land area needed to absorb carbon dioxide emissions, an ecological footprint quiz
incorporates carbon footprint alongside the area necessary to support the harvest of primary
products (e.g., cropland and forest cover) and infrastructure.
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For more information about using ecological footprints in the classroom, see:
http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/teaching-with-ecological-footprints/
Results: What students will be able to do Depending on how the instructor employs this activity, students may learn to:
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Quantify the impact of an individual on ecological systems
Provide concrete examples of the interplay between ecological systems and socioeconomic systems
Describe pro-environmental behaviors in terms of energy efficiency—which behaviors
are more versus less efficient?
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
Ways that this activity enriches the engagement of citizens with social and civic problems having underlying scientific issues This activity connects to several SENCER ideals, including:
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SENCER robustly connects science and civic engagement by teaching “through”
complex, contested, capacious, current, and unresolved public issues “to” basic
science.
The ecological footprint exercise is an analytic tool for unpacking the impact of human
behavior on ecological systems. Climate change can be traced to humanity’s overuse of
Earth’s finite resources, and the ecological footprint exercise enables us to quantify the
impact of extracting and processing the materials we use.
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SENCER invites students to put scientific knowledge and scientific method to
immediate use on matters of immediate interest to students.
Self-relevant material automatically captures students’ attention. The ecological footprint
quiz starts with systematic inquiry into how they live and provides immediate, usually
surprising, feedback about their lifestyles.
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SENCER helps reveal the limits of science by identifying the elements of public
issues where science doesn’t help us decide what to do.
What does scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change look like? Do we have
such consensus? If not, should we wait to take action until we do? This connection paves
the way for study of the relationship between science and public policy.
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SENCER shows the power of science by identifying the dimensions of a public issue
that can be better understood with certain mathematical and scientific ways of
knowing.
Our collective behavior is taxing the biocapacity of our planet. Ecological footprint
analyses can capture the degree of disconnect between how we live and the resources
available to sustain our lifestyles. Ecological footprint analyses enable us—require us—
to account for the entire life cycle of our consumption habits.
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SENCER conceives the intellectual project as practical and engaged from the start,
as opposed to science education models that view the mind as a kind of “storage
shed” where abstract knowledge may be secreted for vague potential uses.
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
The ecological footprint exercise is a direct invitation to students to consider their role in
the problem of climate change. The ecological footprint exercise immediately invites
questioning as students seek to understand why their footprints are so high.
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SENCER seeks to extract from the immediate issues the larger, common lessons
about scientific processes and methods.
Students’ exploration of the assumptions made by the ecological footprint calculation can
lead to their consideration of scientific values and assumptions more broadly.
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SENCER locates the responsibilities (the burdens and the pleasures) of discovery as
the work of the student.
This activity relies upon guided discovery rather than pure discovery. It assumes that
students learn best by selecting relevant incoming information, organizing it into a
coherent structure, and integrating it with other organized knowledge (Mayer, 2004). To
this end, the ecological footprint exercise enables students to independently study how
their specific behavior patterns comprise their ecological footprint, and then work with
their classmates to link their individual-level behavior to the collective behavior of cities
or nations.
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SENCER, by focusing on contested issues, encourages student engagement with
“multidisciplinary trouble” and with civic questions that require attention now. By
doing so, SENCER hopes to help students overcome both unfounded fears and
unquestioning awe of science.
Climate change is one of the wicked problems of our time. Report after report examines
whether we have surpassed various tipping points, ominously concluding in some cases
that humans cannot undo what they have done to the biosphere. The tone of these reports
is often dark and pessimistic, when instead we must strive to teach about climate change
in ways that arouse hope and motivate behavior change.
The College Board’s Enduring Understandings that connect most closely Physics
Big Idea 3: Changes that occur as a result of interactions are constrained by conservation laws.
Enduring Understanding 5.A: Certain quantities are conserved, in the sense that the
changes of those quantities in a given system are always equal to the transfer of that
quantity to or from the system by all possible interactions with other systems.
Other fundamental scientific questions addressed Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University
The ecological footprint exercise could be a useful introduction to physics in the context of
energy supply and climate change. After all, does the push for growth and development not seek
to defy the laws of physics? Life is in essence prolonged departure from thermodynamic
equilibrium. In effect, the human enterprise is thermodynamically positioned to consume the
ecosphere from the inside out (Rees, 1999).
Additional resources Ecological footprint quizzes
 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/)
 http://myfootprint.org/en/
 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/article_uploads/NFA 2014 Guidebook 7-1414.pdf, for more about the specific formulas upon which the ecological footprint analysis
relies
Carbon footprint quizzes
 http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/
 http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/carboncalculator
Brooks, A. 2011. Ecological footprint feedback: Motivating or discouraging? Social Influence 6
(2), 113-128.
Gardner, G. T., and P. C. Stern. 2008. The short list: The most effective actions U.S. households
can take to curb climate change. Environment 50: 13-24.
Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? The
case for guided methods of instruction. American Psychologist 59 (1): 14-19.
Rees, W. (1999). Scale, complexity, and the conundrum of sustainability. In M. Kenny and J.
Meadowcroft (eds.), Planning sustainability. New York: Routledge.
Produced by Alison O’Malley, Department of Psychology
Butler University