Origins to the 'Global Village' email

The Originator and story behind "The Global Village"

Hardcopy published : Autumn, 2001. Concepts Magazine, California,
USA,

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&;#8230;.". [The email
version, and the full original version are included in and 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 Smith's
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 of this
year - 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.

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. 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

Copyright David Taub (UKpoet@aol.com), April 2001

David Taub is a member of
The British organisation 'National Union of Journalists' (NUJ);
Columnist 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