Månedens sitat
Juni 2007

The Miniature Earth Project

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»

Footnotes on the above statistics

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 distributed 50.000 copies of a Value Earth poster at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Sources

Research for many of the facts for this 2005 update was done by Donella H. Meadows' think tank: The Sustainability Institute. The rest come from a variety of sources:

• David Smith's children's book: If the World Were a Village
• The CIA World Factbook 2001
• 2001 World Development Indicators
• World Bank
• Adherents 2001
• Bread for the World
• United Nations Population Fund
• The Global Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report

With so many new reports and constantly changing statistics, please view the above presentation as general and not meant to be totally accurate. It is more for the purpose of fostering understanding, so that we might better dialogue and understand the different cultures of our world...