I am a day late and a dollar short for Earth Day but my thoughts are that we should celebrate it all year long, along with numbers. Here are some interesting Earth Day Numbers:
Imagine that the whole population of the earth is reduced down to a village of 100 people. I know that is hard to imagine but how many of those people do you think would be from North America? Well if we broke it down to continents the numbers would look like this:
61 from Asia
13 from Africa
12 from Europe
8 from South America, including Central America and Mexico
5 from North American (excluding Mexico)
1 from Australia or Pacific Islands
Ages of the 100 villagers would be:
10 are children under the age 5
10 are children between 5 and 9
19 are between 10 and 19
(39 are under the age of 20)
16 are between 20 and 29
(55 are under the age of 30)
15 are between 30 and 39
11 are between 40 and 49
9 are between 50 and 59
6 are between 60 and 69
3 are between 70 and 79
1 is over 79
There is no shortage of food in the global village but the food isn't divided equally so
60 people are always hungry
and 26 of them are severely undernourished
24 people always have enough to eat and most are wasteful with their food.
75 people have access to clean water
25 people do not and spend much of their day simply getting to clean water
60 have access to adequate sanitation, public or household sewage disposals
40 people do not
68 breath clean air
32 beathe air that is unhealthy because of pollution.
76 people have electricity
24 do not
38 are school aged but only 31 of them attend school
and there is only 1 teacher for those 38 students
71 can read, at least a little
17 can't read at all
The richest 20 people in the village make over $9000 a year
The poorest 20 people make less than $1 a day
60 people fall in between
To find more about this global village check out the book "If the World Were a Village" by David J. Smith. Published 2002.
