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If you have ever seen the long-time circulating email which has become known as the "Global Village 100" email - An email which basically considers what the 'global village of 100 people' would look like - have you wondered who or thought you knew who was the originator? This is the story behind how the originator was traced, and who she really was!
The Originator and story behind "The Global Village"
By David Taub (Ukpoet.aol.com)
For several years now, an email has been circulating the internet titled "The Global Village'. The crux of it being, "If the world were scaled down to 100 people, the percentage that makes up each ethnic, cultural, educational type, etc., would be
.". [The email version, and the full original version appear toward the end of this article]
The originator of "The Global Village" email, has repeatedly been quoted as either Dr. Philip Harter of Stanford University or, more often, simply 'anonymous'. This can also be seen to be the case, on a number of internet websites where the email version has been posted.
The Daily Mail newspaper in England featured the article about the email version on February 17th, 2001, also not knowing who the originator was. After several months' extensive research, I am delighted and relieved to have discovered who the person was behind the concept, "The Global Village" and the original article, which considered a "Global Village of 1000" (not the simplified version of "100" in the email). But, the journey to finding that person led me up several blind alleys. Two of those being the connection with Dr. Harter, and then, again, with another author and lecturer, Marianne Williamson. I previously wrote two articles about those 'explorations', titled "Searching World-wide for this Unknown author", as they were of some interest in their own rights. Particularly concerning Dr. Philip Harter who told me in a phone conversation:
"This 'quote' [the quoting of Dr. Harter as author] has been the source of some very interesting mail. I have received questions from 5th grade teachers, college professors, the World Health Organization, CNN, the UN (twice), the White House, and even George Gallup (of poll fame). Recently, I was quoted on the radio in Alberta, Canada, Liz Smiths Gossip column, and even had a page dedicated to this in a Latvian newspaper. If nothing else, it demonstrates the power of the Internet."
Dr. Harter went on to explain:
"Unfortunately, all I did was forward what I thought was an interesting posting to a few friends, but did not omit my 'automatic signature,' since my e-mail program indicates when messages are forwarded. I can neither claim authorship, nor knowledge of its source. My fear is that my name will permanently be attached to this, I'll get rich and famous, and have to quit my day job."
Marianne Williamson's connection with the "Global Village" email version was discussed with me by her PR and Literary agent, B.G., who confirmed that the information (in the circulating email version) appears, in part, in Marianne Williamson's book, Healing the Soul of America. However, the mystery still remained unsolved concerning where this information originated from, as Williamson does not claim to be the 'originator' of the data, nor the author of the exact wording, as has frequently accompanied the data in circulating emails and website postings.
Regarding who first circulated, by email, the simplified version of the "Global Village" article, compared to the original full version, pales into insignificance, having discovered who the original author was. That being a remarkable woman called Donella H. Meadows.
Sadly and ironically, Donella Meadows died on 21st February 2001 just four days after the Daily Mail in England printed the email version article. It turns out that Donella Meadows was a Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; an highly accomplished author, lecturer and environmental journalist.
The truth is that her accomplishments and resume are so extensive, that it would require several pages just to cover them all. However, her former assistant, Diana Wright kindly provided me with both a long and shortened bio-resume of Donella Meadows, as well as the original copy of the unabridged version of The Global Village, first printed in 1990.
The 'shortened' bio-resume reads:
Donella H. Meadows
Born March 13, 1941
in Elgin, Illinois
Donella (Dana) Meadows, systems analyst, journalist, college professor, international co-ordinator of resource management institutions, and farmer. She was trained as a scientist, earning a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in 1963 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 1968.
In 1972 Donella Meadows was on the team at MIT that produced the global computer model "World3" for the Club of Rome. She was the principal author of the book The Limits to Growth (1972, Universe Books), which described that model, and which sold millions of copies in 28 languages. She was also co-author of two technical books about the global model: Toward Global Equilibrium and The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World (1973 and 1974, both MIT Press).
Since then she was involved in numerous studies of social, environmental, energy, and agriculture systems. She chronicled the emerging field of global modeling in her 1981 book Groping in the Dark: the First Decade of Global Modeling (John Wiley). In a later book she criticized the state of the art of social system modeling using nine case studies (The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions, also John Wiley, 1983).
In 1985 Donella Meadows began a weekly newspaper column "The Global Citizen," commenting on world events from a systems point of view. The column was awarded second place in the 1985 Champion-Tuck national competition for outstanding journalism in the fields of business and economics. It also received the Walter C. Paine Science Education Award in 1990 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. The column was self-syndicated and appears in more than 20 papers. Selected columns have been published as a book, also called The Global Citizen (Island Press, 1991).
Dana Meadows taught at Dartmouth College since 1972 in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program and in the graduate program of the Resource Policy Center. In 1983 she resigned her tenured professorship to devote more time to international activities and writing. She retained an Adjunct Professorship at Dartmouth and taught environmental journalism. (until her recent death on 21st February, 2001)
With Dennis Meadows she founded and co-ordinated INRIC, the International Network of Resource Information Centers (also called the Balaton Group). INRIC is a coalition of systems-oriented analysts and activists in 50 nations, all of whom work to promote sustainable, high-productivity resource management. Through INRIC Donella Meadows developed training games and workshops on resource management, which she presented in Hungary, Kenya, Costa Rica, Portugal, Singapore, Germany, and the United States. Each year she helped organize a conference in Hungary at which Balaton Group members exchange information and plan joint projects.
During 1988-90 she worked with television producers at WGBH-TV in Boston to develop the ten-part PBS series "Race to Save the Planet." She was writing a college textbook to accompany the programs as part of an Annenberg/CPB telecourse. The book is tentatively titled A Sustainable World: an Introduction to Environmental Systems. It will be published by John Wiley.
Donella Meadows served on the Board of Directors of the Hunger Project, the Winrock International Livestock Research Center, the Trust for New Hampshire Lands, and the Upper Valley Land Trust and the Center for a New American Dream, the latter two of which she helped found. She had been a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress and a member of the Committee for Population, Resources, and the Environment of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society. She had been a visiting scholar at the East-West Center in Honolulu, the Resource Policy Group in Oslo, Norway, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, and the Environmental Systems Analysis Group of the University of Kassel in Germany.
In 1991 Donella Meadows was selected as one of ten Pew Scholars in Conservation and the Environment. Her three-year award supported her international work in resource management with a systems point of view. Also in 1991 Donella Meadows collaborated with her previous co-authors Dennis Meadows and Jnilrgen Randers on a twenty-year update to Limits to Growth, called Beyond the Limits (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992), which has been translated, at last count, into fifteen languages.
In 1994 Dana was awarded a five-year MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
She lived for 27 years on a small, communal, organic farm in New Hampshire, where she worked at sustainable resource management directly. Up to her recent death, she was organizing a larger organic farm, eco-village and research institute (the Sustainability Institute) in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont, where she was starting a research project on the sustainability, equity, and stability of commodity systems.
Concerning Donella Meadows' original "Global Village" article, this was published as follows:
The Global Citizen May 31, 1990
Donella H. Meadows
STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT
If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders
The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak 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 the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religions (including atheists)
One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.
Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from cancer. Two of the deaths would be to babies born within the year.
One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the next year would be 1018.
In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.
Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one automobile).
About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.
The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of which:
700 acres is cropland
1400 acres pasture
1900 acres woodland
2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.
The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable. The village would allocate 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 would cause pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.
If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village's total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.
The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether the 100 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 village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.
(State of The Village copyright held by Sustainability Institute, MA, and reprinted with permission by the copyright holder.)
Perhaps the one person who can be thanked for getting wider attention for the original article is David Copeland of an organisation called Value Earth, based in New Jersey. David Copeland, with Donella Meadows' permission, had 50,000 posters made based on 'The Global Village', for the 1992 Rio de Janiero Earth Summit,
which was attended by people from some 175 countries!
Details of this and the posting of the original article can be found at ttp://www.empowermentsources.com/info2/theglobalvillage
The email version, which has circulated for several years reads:
"If we could shrink the 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
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 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
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent."
It is with a mixed sense of great sadness and joy that I reached this point of the journey. Sadness because mine and Donella's paths came so close to crossing while she was alive. Joy, because of the timing of my being able to conclude this journey and attribute The Global Village article to it's rightful author.
This is my tribute to a remarkable woman.
There were a number of memorial services held around the US on the weekend of 21st April, 2001. Information concerning these can be found at the website of the Sustainability Institute (Donella Meadows' last great unfinished project). The general site is http://sustainer.org. The specific website address for the memorial plans is: http://sustainer.org/meadows/memorials.html
First published in Concepts magazine (California, USA), June, 2001 issue.
April 2001 - Copyright David Taub.
Subsequently a book, fast becoming a best-seller by Magazinehouse, Japan, was published early 2002, by the 'storyteller' Kayoko Ikeda and translator, Douglas Lummis.
David Taub gave a one hour television interview, concerning this article, to the South Korean national television station, KBS, in May 2002. (Viewing audience estimated at 8 to 10 million)
David Taub is a member of
The British organisation 'National Union of Journalists' (NUJ);
Overseas Columnist (resident in Florida, USA) for the UK magazine 'Poetry Now';
Freelance writer for various UK and USA magazines;
Co-author of Language of Souls (listed on amazon.com)
Website: www.ukpoet.cjb.net
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