By analyzing divorce statistics and environmental impact data, Jianguo Liu and Eunice Yu of Michigan State University have shown the ecological effect of divorce in a recent study featured in a National Science Foundation press release.
"People’s first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple. But a lot of things become simple after research is done. Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships. People have been talking about how to protect the environment . . . but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Liu said in the NSF release.
As a common outcome of divorce, families retain family homes, while forming additional households requiring heat, electricity, water and other resources, Liu said. This means that the family, in aggregate, enlarges their environmental impact or environmental “footprint.” The recently completed study quantifies many of these unnecessary expenditures:
· In 2005, U.S. families used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved if the families were living under one roof.
· Between 1998 and 2002, in the U.S. and 11 other countries, if divorced households were combined to produce the same household size as married families, it would have eliminated 7.4 million households.
· Around the year 2000, the numbers of divorced households in the 12 countries mentioned ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States.
· In divorced households, the number of rooms per resident was 33 to 95 percent greater than that in married households.
With 38 million extra rooms to heat, illuminate, air condition, etc., divorcees pay 42 to 61 percent more on household resources than their married counterparts, according to the MSU study. Liu says because divorce has such a substantial impact, governments may have to account for it when examining environmental policy.
Divorcees should fall back in love and remarry, Liu suggests, if they intend to conserve resources – because the environmental footprint of remarried households shrinks to match traditional married households. Divorcees who don’t remarry can try to minimize unnecessary energy use by living in condos, townhouses or other dwellings that don’t have too much extra space.
A university distinguished professor, Liu has spent more than 20 years integrating ecology with social science to understand the complex interplay between humans and nature. Liu says he began discussing this research project with his assistant, Eunice Yu when she was a high school student. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
Matthew Clarke - Born and raised in Northern California, Matthew Clarke is the product of summer campouts on the Sierras, briskly sunny Christmas mornings ...
