Is there intelligent life in Earth? Student: Ana Rosa Teacher: Maria Fernanda

The club of Rome The club of Rome is an illustrious group of people who gather to discuss a wide range of issues related to politics, international economy and, especially, the environment and sustainable development. It was founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, Italian industrialist and by Scottish scientist Alexander King.

The Limits to Grow It became popular after 1972, the year of publication of report entitled The Limits to Grow, prepared by an MIT team, contracted by the Club of Rome and headed for Dona Meadows.

BACKGROUND We lived in times of optimism in the global economy: high growth rates are repeated year after year, oil was cheap and abundantly available capital. Little is told of the environment, ecology, the depletion of nonrenewable recourses, limits the carrying capacity of the planet.

TWO HEROINES Two examples of global heroines are Rachael Carson and Donna Meadows. In her legendary 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson simply described, documented and demonstrate that the decreased population of birds was due primarily to the impact of DDT. It was the beginning of the end of the indiscriminate use of all pesticides. Silent Spring

VILLAGE OF 100 Environmentalists Donna Meadows searched for a way to make the difficult statistics of world poverty, hunger, disease, and conflict real to each person on Earth. The numbers are so big, how would anything she’d do speak to everyone? Her brilliant solution was to ask people, and children in particular, to imagine the entire world was one village. She then described this village as having a high percentage of people unemployed with a few employed; a high percentage of people living with very little water with very few people enjoying an abundance of water, etc. Her idea of taking the entire earth and treating it like a village captured people’s imagination.

If the World Were a Village of 100 People If we could reduce the world's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this: The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific 51 would be male, 49 would be female 82 would be non-white; 18 white 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian 80 would live in substandard housing 67 would be unable to read 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation 33 would be without access to a safe water supply 39 would lack access to improved sanitation 24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.) 7 people would have access to the Internet 1 would have a college education 1 would have HIV 2 would be near birth; 1 near death 5 would control 32% of the entire world's wealth; all 5 would be US citizens 33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of "the village" The original version of the STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT by Donella H. Meadows was published in 1990 as "Who lives in the Global Village?" and updated in 2005.

Sustainable development Sustainable development (SD) is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.

Sustainable development Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social challenges facing humanity. As early as the 1970s "sustainability" was employed to describe an economy "in equilibrium with basic ecological support systems”.