Julian Cross - My Blog

Everything I heard about overcrowding used to just through one ear and out the other, generally in a school context I would be overloaded with facts and numbers with seven, eight and nine digits; there was never enough of anything for me to relate too or fully comprehend. I don’t mean to say that my ability to understand is from a lack of intellect or consideration for global issues but merely that when presented to me in such non-relatable ways I couldn’t completely appreciate the significance.
When presented in the form of children’s book, now we are talking, If the World Were a Village takes all the facts and numbers and turns these in too percentages of the world and then takes these percentages and personifies them as people in the village. Because the only metaphor is the microcosm from the vast population of the world to a little village of a hundred, the comparison is not too intricate and unclear. Many parts of the book enlightened me to many shocking facts that I have not heard prior to reading the book.
For one, the pages about the exponential growth of the world, as it doubles and doubles, was something I did already know. However, when I discovered that the “Village” could only support 250 people and the expected time frame for this growth was 140 years, I was shocked within the lifetime of my children’s children, the world will reach its population cap. Wow! This is a scary thought, if you account for the social psychology of the world and human kinds historical inability to eradicate injustice and the great difference between standards of living, how much worse will this be if the population doubled?