Global Village

~As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.
~Ram Dass

Two days in a row! Haha, so, during my lunch break at work I've been reading a book called You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don't Need by Mary Ellen Edmunds. I'd read the first section before, but it's been a year or two. Today I came across a very interesting concept that I wanted to share. I'm just going to copy out of the book-I can't really paraphrase :)

"If the world were a global village"

"If we could shrink 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, and 8 Africans.

-52 would be female, 48 would be male.

-70 would be nonwhite, 30 would be white.

-70 would be non-Christian, 30 would be Christian.

-6 people would posses 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; and 1 would own a computer."

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"...nearly 42,000 children die every single day in this world from preventable causes..."

"...And every single day here in America, we spend more than a billion dollars on groceries, consume more than 25 billion gallons of water--almost 200 gallons per person--and throw out close to 2 billion pounds of trash...these numbers are from way back in 1987..."