It's a Big World...

A big crowd at State Fair. 8/9/2010 dwm photo

 There are plenty of times we recognize that this world is small. You meet someone and in the course of a conversation, you realize you share a mutual friend or have something in common.

 

 It's a moment when the song, "It's a small world, after all," plays in our brain. 

 

 That's a good thing. In college, I became friends with classmates from around the world: Tanzania, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,, to name a few.

 When you think we now have 7.8 billion other people traveling around the sun with us, I marvel at the number of open spaces that remain and worry about our impact.

It's World Population Day, a good time to recognize that our impact isn't equal across the globe. People living in the developed world make more of an impact because we use more resources.

The earth's population hit 1 billion in 1800, by 2057 the United Nations expects the world population to reach 10 billion people.

How will everyone eat; live; and work?

By 2057, we'll need to be on our way to slowing and reversing the effects of global warming. It's harder to think how the world will look politically in 34 years, I hope there are strong efforts to finding ways to get along.

It's difficult to be hopeful. The good news about that, is if you've ever reviewed past predictions of the future, the most dire predictions haven't come true.