RE: [GBlist] house thoughts

[Kerryn Wilmot <kerrynw@mel.spowers.com.au>]

Regarding:
		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Mike Falstad
[SMTP:mfalstad@johnmilnerassociates.com]

		A while back, I saw an email (perhaps it was on this
list) that compared
		several global statistics on standards of living.  <cut>

I saved this from another list I am on.  Forwarding the relevant bits,
for the benefit of those who have not seen it.  

The message from which this is extracted described the author's search
for the original author of this report.  He noted that the original by
Donella Meadows was based on a village of 1000 people; a simplified
version of 100 people was doing the email rounds.  Both are attached
here.

Regards,

Kerryn
_______________________

Concerning Donella Meadows' original "Global Village" article, this was
published as follows:
The Global Citizen May 31, 1990
Donella H. Meadows

STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT

If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians,
Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty
communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. 
The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali,
Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other
languages.

In the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religions (including atheists)

One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the
children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases
such as measles and polio.
Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using
modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.
Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from
cancer. Two of the deaths would be to babies born within the year.
One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that
person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of
AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the
next year would be 1018.

In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive
three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the
income.
Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one
automobile).
About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.

The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of
which:
700 acres is cropland
1400 acres pasture
1900 acres woodland
2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.
The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the
other land categories would be roughly stable. 
The village would allocate 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of
its cropland -- that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people.
Excess fertilizer running off this land would cause pollution in lakes
and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of
the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73
percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be
one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.

If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five
soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. 
Of the village's total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per
year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education,
$132,000 for health care.

The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in
nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These
weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other
900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether
the 100 can learn to get along together, and if they do, whether they
might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical
bungling, and if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the
village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of
which the weapons are made. 
END

Details of this and the posting of the original article can be found at 
ttp://www.empowermentsources.com/info2/theglobalvillage

The email version, which has circulated for several years reads:

"If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100
people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would
look something like the following. There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and
all 6 would be from the United States

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth

1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education

1 would own a computer



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