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>
Perhaps the one person who can be thanked for getting wider attention for the original
article is David Copeland of an organisation called Value Earth, based in New Jersey.
David Copeland, with Donella Meadows' permission, had several thousand posters made
based on 'The Global Village', for the 1992 Rio de Janiero Earth Summit.
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
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both
acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent."<END>