Here at ELCA World Hunger we’ve been watching films on hunger and poverty and preparing study guides for your use. Over the summer I will be highlighting some of the films that you may want to use for an adult forum or Wednesday night film series or just to watch and ponder on your own. I will post a summary of the film with links to the film’s Web site and the discussion questions every Monday. Happy viewing!
Human Footprint explores the consumption patterns of an average person in the U.S. from birth to 77 years 9 months in a variety of interesting visual ways. The filmmakers follow two typical people in the U.S. through each stage of life, focus on a sample of consumer products relevant to that life stage, deconstruct some of the products into their raw material components, and build models that represent the average per-person lifetime footprint. The quantities of goods that are consumed by the average U.S. citizen in a lifetime are shocking. A pile of 3,796 diapers on the front lawn (made from 1,898 pints of crude oil and the pulp of 4.5 trees), 19,826 eggs dumped from a truck, 5,054 newspapers (made from 43 trees), and 28,433 rubber ducks lined up to represent the average number of showers taken (using 700,000 gallons of water over a lifetime).
A discussion guide to the film is available here.
