Posts
I am totally stealing this from my friend Steve's blog, but it is well worth repeating. If the world was a village of 100 people (source):
If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white; 18 white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do
have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of “the village”
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Global Church
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Chris, thanks for taking a look at this. At the source from which I copied the information, they have this at the bottom:
The original version of the STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT by Donella H. Meadows was published in 1990 as "Who lives in the Global Village?" and updated in 2005. The initial report was based on a village of 1000. David Copeland, a surveyor and environmental activist, revised the report to reflect a village of 100 and single-handedly distributed 50,000 copies of a Value Earth poster at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Research for many of the facts for this 2005 update was done by Donella H. Meadows’ think tank: the Sustainability Institute. (See www.odt.org/pop.htm for further details.) The rest come from a variety of sources including David Smith’s children’s book: If the World Were a Village, the CIA World Factbook 2001 (age, birth, death, internet), 2001 World Development Indicators, World Bank (HIV), Adherents 2001 (religion) Bread for the World (malnourishment), United Nations Population Fund (food security) The Global Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report (improved water, improved sanitation)
Further, I emailed the source and asked them to check it out.
After reading the snopes column, some of the numbers are actually pretty close and some are far off. Some of this could be attributed to ambiguous wording such as "substandard housing". I'll post another comment when I hear back from them.
Post a Comment