The word footprint has taken on meaning,” writes Michel Berger of Oakland, California, responding to a recent query in this space, “beyond that of simple circumstantial evidence that someone has walked by, as in Daniel Defoe”s 1719 novel ”Robinson Crusoe.” Where are those footprints headed?”
Computers, which usually don”t have any feet, take up room on a desk; they used to lie flat, leaving little room for a telephone, a spouse”s picture, souvenir coasters and other desktop doodads. But a generation ago, spaced-in designers thought of turning the machine on its side, making a “mini-tower.” When the University of British Columbia issued one of these space savers in 1992 to William Rees, that regional planning professor – working on a paper about “regional capsules” – recalls telling a doctoral student that he especially liked its “smaller footprint” on his desk. Then the idea hit him: “It took just a few seconds to replace every reference to ”regional capsule” in the paper with ”ecological footprint.” ”
This gave impetus to the March of the Metaphoric Footprints. Rees” young colleague Dr. Mathis Wackernagel is now the executive director of the Global Footprint Network. Linguistic ichnologists track the trope back to 1965, as “the proposed landing area for a spacecraft.”
In 2000, after global warming heated up the issue stove, a spokesman for a Texas electricity marketer told The Seattle Times, “It”s essential to reduce our environmental footprint, and at this point in our world”s history, reduce our carbon footprint.” Dr. Wackernagel informs me that the phrase received “its biggest boost in 2005 through an enormous BP media campaign on the carbon footprint.” The New Oxford American Dictionary”s word of the year for 2006 was the footprint-obliterating carbon-neutral. A few months ago, The New York Times reported California researchers asking “provocative questions about the carbon footprint of food.”
But ecology will not abandon the footstep field. “Diapers Go Green” was the headline of a Time magazine article a few weeks ago, its subhead “Eco-friendly and cost-conscious parents are returning to cloth to cover their babies” bottoms.” Natalie Brown, a Maryland mother of three, is quoted saying, “I”m not a huge green fan, but I love that I”m leaving less of a footprint.”
Perhaps Mrs. Brown will one day read to her children the novel of adventurous loneliness by Defoe, or at least this verse from an 1838 Longfellow psalm: “Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time. . . .”
__________________
The New York Times