"You say that resources are not consumed but produced. But the whole concept of ecological footprinting is based on quantifying the amount of land required to support a given person or nation."

Will,
The point is that nations with higher average GDP are far more able to utilize land efficiently (that is, need less land, for example to provide food for a given person). This occurs precisely because the technology is better. So technology both drives the relative size of the footprint of a country and the amount of food that can be produced from a given amount of land.

It makes no sense to "quantify the amount of land needed to support a given person..." and then quantify which people are taking more than their share.

The amount of land needed to support a person is not fixed. Essentially, the poorer nations are not utilizing their land efficiently, so this drives up the world-wide average amount of land needed to support a given person. If poor nations would develop economically, their efficiency in land use would increase, and therefore the world-wide average amount of land needed to support a person would decrease.

Therefore, if poor nations economically develop, each person worldwide will need less than the cited "2.2" global hectares that is said to be required to support the demands he places on the environment (because more efficient land use usually places less demand on the environment, for a given amount of people). So helping poor countries to be economically vibrant, paradoxically decreases the relative "ecological footprint" of the United States.

"The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed – the latest data available (for 2003)indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint, our impact upon the planet, has more than tripled since 1961. Our footprint now exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 per cent."

This does not make sense. In free societies, we do not "consume" resources, rather in net we produce them. The elements needed to sustain life are virtually limitless throughout the universe. What is often scarce is our knowledge (and ethical behavior). As mentioned in a previous post, it is knowledge deficiencies alone that make energy scarce. If we grow virtually all of earth's food in space or on another planet, the 2.2 global hectares that is said to be needed to support the demands a person places on the (earth's) environment will shrink to close to nothing.

Our continued focus on economic growth via knowledge growth when coupled with ethical behavior will continue to make the world a more hospitable (and ecologically safe) place for humans.