ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that more modern lifestyles consume more resources, so there is a pressing need to discover how and why ecological footprints have changed over time. Analysing the almost certainly lower ecological footprint of a developing country will not always provide a relevant example for developed nations to follow, because for many people a low-impact lifestyle results from living with rural subsistence farming. For example, in India in the 1990s about 70 per cent of the population were involved in agriculture (EIU, 1997) when the country had an ecological footprint of only 0.38 global average hectares (gha) per person (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996).
