One of the sights on our Museum Trail is Little Land. It is a display showing the per-capita United States American land use footprint, scaled to the size of a Lego character (1:40) and formed into a treemap, graphically representing the proportional areas of use. This is how it will be more easy to imagine what effect each consumer choice might have, rather than just give information in metric tons of CO2 and gigajoules of energy we consume.
The display is an accurate depiction of land use of the average US American, as well as the lifetime average usage of many common materials and resources and waste, in a way that is easy to see, recognize, and understand.
Little Land includes:
- Acres of developed land (cities, roads, parks, homes)
- Acres of impermeable surface
- Acres of agriculture, including soy, wheat, alfalfa, corn, and canola, as the main crops.
- Quantity of cows, chickens and pigs
- Acres of pasture land
- Acres of timber forest and percentage used for lumber, paper, and firewood.
- Land use of mining
- Land use of landfill and quantity of waste
- Quantity of coal, oil, gasoline, natural gas
- Quantity of paper, timber, firewood
- Quantity of concrete, sand, gravel, rock, and iron ore
Potential Future Expansion of Little Land could include the same representation for a south-Indian person, as well as for a permacultural and minimalist lifestyle.
Having these different representations will show how different lifestyle and design has different effects on our land use and resource footprint.