Halloween, and a snow day already—yes, two months before winter officially starts. About 2,000,000 east-coast customers have no electricity; countless trees broke because they hadn’t lost their leaves yet. It’s Monday, and trick-or-treating has been moved to Saturday in many towns. Halloween is a lot of fun, and is being celebrated in more and more countries. But when you think about it, it’s a pretty frivolous holiday.
In contrast, many people in the world can’t even come close to affording such extravagances. A high school student who had done a service learning project abroad had a very astute observation: people who live on $1-$2 a day and don’t have education CAN’T solve their problems on their own.
Amy Smith knows that truth from experience. Her team takes good science to developing countries and helps people use the resources around them to improve their lives. She also has some wonderful insights on how to help individuals rise out of poverty.
Amy Smith Shares Simple Lifesaving Design (TED Talk)
Population growth is related to factors such as health, food, water, energy, poverty, education, employment, and housing, and how we handle them. These are global issues, so we must work on them together.
Part of doing global work well is the ability to understand people in different cultures. The best way to do that is to live abroad and learn the local language.
The world’s population has been growing exponentially, and today, we hit 7 billion.
Visualizing How a Population Grows to 7 Billion (NPR)
Hans Rosling\’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats (BBC)
The last point in the video embedded in the article below is particularly poignant. For about the same amount of money we spend on Halloween, we could make great strides in controlling population growth, which is key to the other issues.
