If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include:
 

  • 584 Asians
  • 124 Africans
  • 95 eastern and western Europeans
  • 84 Latin Americans
  • 55 former Soviets (including Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and other national groups)
  • 52 North Americans
  • 6 Australians and New Zealanders.

The people of the village have considerable difficulty in communicating:

  • 165 people speak Mandarin
  • 86 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 this village of 1,000 there are:

  • 329 Christians (among them 187 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 31 Orthodox)
  • 178 Muslims
  • 167 “nonreligious”
  • 132 Hindus
  • 60 Buddhists
  • 45 atheists
  • 3 Jews
  • 86 all other religions.

One-third (330) of the 1,000 people in the world village are children, and only 60 are over the age of 65. Half the children are immunized against preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.

Just under half of the married women in the village have access to and use modern contraceptives.

This year 28 babies will be born. Ten people will die, 3 of them for lack of food, 1 from cancer; 2 of the deaths will be of babies born within the year. One person of the 1,000 in the village is infected with the HIV virus; that person most likely has not yet developed a full-blown case of AIDS.

With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village next year will be 1,018.

In this 1,000-person community, 200 people receive 75 percent of the income; another 200 receive only 2 percent of the income.

Only 70 people of the 1,000 own an automobile (although some of the 70 own more than 1).

About one-third have access to clean, safe drinking water.

Of the 670 adults in the village, half are illiterate.

The village has 6 acres of land per person — 6,000 acres in all — of which:

  • 700 acres are cropland
  • 1,400 acres pasture
  • 1,900 acres woodland
  • 2,000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.

The woodland is declining rapidly; the wasteland is increasing. The other land categories are roughly stable.

The village allocates 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 causes pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, produces only 28 percent of the food grains but feeds 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land is one-third the harvest achieved by the richer villagers.

In the village of 1,000 people, there are:

  • 5 soldiers
  • 7 teachers
  • 1 doctor
  • 3 refugees driven from home by war or drought.

The village has a total yearly budget, public and private, of over $3 million — $3,000 per person if it is distributed evenly (which, as we have already seen, it isn’t).

Of the total $3 million:

  • $181,000 goes to weapons and warfare
  • $159,000 to education
  • $132,000 to health care.

The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons are under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 are watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether they 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 world village will they dispose of the radioactive materials of which the weapons are made?

Donella H. Meadows’s “If the World Were a Village of 1,000 People” appeared in the anthology Futures by Design: The Practice of Ecological Planning, edited by Doug Aberley. © 1994 by Doug Aberley. It is reprinted here by permission of New Society Publishers, 4527 Springfield Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19143, (800) 333-9093.

— Ed.