Have you ever wanted to know just how much of an environmental parasite you really are?
If so, you’re in luck. Consumer Consequences, American Public Media’s new educational video game, gauges players’ environmental impact on the planet, based on where they live, what they eat and how much they drive, among other basic lifestyle choices.
The web-based game, part of APM’s Public Insight Journalism project, asks players about their monthly energy bills, diet and transportation choices and shopping habits and tallies the natural resources required to keep them up.
“The idea is to invite a lot of people to tell us about their lifestyles and get a sense of the changes they would make or would not make to lessen their footprint,” says Michael Skoler, director of APM’s Center for Innovation in Journalism. “What I like about it is that it tells me exactly where I’m screwing up.”
Put your own habits to the test on the site.
Since going public Sept. 14, Consumer Consequences has attracted more than 90,000 players. It not only reveals the hidden eco-costs of their lifestyles; it also functions as a recruiting tool for the public insight project’s growing network of volunteer news sources. So far, roughly 2 percent of the players have signed on to the network.
Even players who don’t join are helping the cause by providing useful data about their choices and additional feedback that APM analysts use to guide future news coverage.
“We’re mining all of the information that people provide to look for trends that will helps us decide what the most relevant stories are,” Skoler says.
APM sister network Minnesota Public Radio used this approach with several annual editions of an online game that let players attempt to balance the state budget. Analysts reviewed the data and comments, reporters followed up on apparent trends and the result was “budget stories no one else had,” Skoler says.
He hopes Consumer Consequences yields similar fruit on the sustainability beat.
To assign “scores,” the game relies on a common carbon footprint measurement called a “global acre” of average biological productivity. Since roughly a quarter of the Earth’s surface is productive and there are approximately 6.6 billion people on the planet, the game assumes that each human’s fair share is 4.5 global acres.
As players move through the questions, the game calculates their carbon footprints and estimates how many “Earths” of natural resources it would take to support all 6.6 billion humans if everyone lived like the players do. (If you live in the United States, you’re almost sure to use more than your share.)
The math and science behind Consumer Consequences come mostly from Redefining Progress, a public-policy think tank focused on sustainable economic growth. The game is essentially a souped-up version of the think tank’s ecological footprint calculator.
Realtime Associates Inc., the primary developer on the APM game, added cartoon avatars and an animated, scrim-like background that adjusts after each set of questions to reflect players’ environmental impact. Pastoral vistas give way to sprawl as earth movers, power lines and big-box stores replace the trees and rolling green hills.
“The backgrounds give it more of the feel of a game, even though at heart it’s a calculator,” says Joellen Easton, a public insight analyst for APM in Los Angeles.
The results that it calculates are the most striking aspect of Consumer Consequences — the environmental costs casually green Americans aren’t likely to recognize. Even carpooling recyclers are likely to score worse than expected if they take more than a couple plane trips a year. Other seemingly innocuous indulgences — your morning cup of coffee, for example — carry hidden ecological costs.
“After oil,” the game reminds you as your footprint expands, “coffee is the commodity most heavily traded — and highly traveled.”
In a recent session, a smug, farmers’-market-shopping, subway-riding journalist (ahem) learned that he still uses nearly five times his share of the planet’s resources.
“One of the most common kinds of comments we’re getting,” Easton says, “is, ‘I’d thought I was going to get a great score because I’m on the recycling committee at work. But instead I was shocked and humiliated.’”
Prepare to be humbled.
Web page posted Oct. 15, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
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LINKS
American Public Media's Consumer Consequences website.
Redefining Progress,,(subtitle: The Nature of Economics), the thinktank that provided data underyling APM'sConsumer Consequences web application, says it specializes in "smart economics" and publishes a Genuine Progress Indicator statistic as an alternative to the Gross Domestic Product. The group was founded by Ted Halstead, who later founded and headed the New America Foundation. James Barrett, executive director of Redefining Progress, was previously an economist with the Economic Policy Institute and senior economist with the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.