IF THE WORLD WERE A VILLAGE OF 1000 PEOPLE

It would include:

584 Asians

124 Africans

95 East and West Europeans

84 Latin Americans

55 Soviets (including for the moment 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 speak Mandarin

86 English

64 Spainish

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 of 1,000 there are:

329 Christians; among them:

187 Catholics

84 Protestants

31 Orthodox

178 Moslems

167 "non-religious"

132 Hindus

60 Buddhists

45 athiests

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 measels and polio. Just under half of the married women in the village have access to and use modern contraceptives. The first year 28 babies are born. That year 10 people die, 3 of them for lack of food, 1 from cancer, 2 of the deaths are babies born within the year. One person of the 1,000 is infected with the HIV virus; that person most likely has not yet developed a full-blown case of AIDS. With 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the second year is 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 one automobile).

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

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

The village has six acres of land per person, 6,000 acres in all, of which 700 acres are cropland, 1,400 acres are 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 28 percent of the food grains and feeds for 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land is one-third the harvest owned by the richest villagers.

In the village of 1,00 people, there are:

5 soldiers

7 teachers

1 doctor

3 refugees driven from home by war or drought

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

Of the total $3 million:

$ 181,000 goes to weapons and warfare

$ 159,000 for education

$ 132,000 for health care

The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weaons are under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people 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 they would dispose of the radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.

Donella H. Meadows -- pre 1994 data