Food for thought in 2007
I was looking for some stats on the largest cities in North America the other day (it’s easy to assume that New York is the largest city in North America, when it’s actually #2) and came across this rather stunning list of the populations of the one hundred largest cities in the world. Take a long look at that list and notice how few cities there are from Europe and North America. That really puts things into perspective about the size of the world.
I also was struck by Doug Saunders column from this past weekend’s Globe and Mail. In it, he pointed out a number of important shifts that have occurred over the last year:
From a future historian’s viewpoint, there were two huge developments that will define 2006.
First, it was the year the eastern half of the world, driven by India and China, accounted for more than half the world’s economic output for the first time in two centuries. Or, to be more precise, Asia began to win back the dominance it had lost during an awkward period of Western empires.
Second, it marked a key moment in the final great shift of human populations. There are now more humans living in cities than in the countryside for the first time since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago.
When the West began moving from country to city 300 years ago, the result was the industrial revolution and the modern world. For the four billion people in the East, that transition is finally getting under way in earnest.
China alone is undergoing the largest migration in human history. The shift is already having profound implications.
Lots to ponder from those facts alone. Aside from the huge issue of global warming, something I wrote about in an earlier post, It’s easy sitting where I am to think that the world is not changing all that much. Clearly, that’s not the case!
1 comment
Another interesting read, certainly opens your eyes on certain subjects
i hope my site can produce the same sort of info in the future – Global Warming