Our World Village

In 1990 a professor at Dartmouth College wrote an article that began with the words: "If the world were a village of 1000 people..."

Professor Donella Meadows then proceeded to list statistics about the make-up of the world's population and the distribution of the world's wealth and resources. Meadows probably never imagined this simple article for her column called "The Global Citizen" would one day be widely circulated on the Internet and around the world, updated and even turned into a children's book. But the statistics, when boiled down into simple numbers that anyone could understand, are compelling reading and make it easy for everyone to grasp the inequities in our small world village.