What’s the best you can do on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight? Maybe what I’m doing just now. Taking a screenshot at Worldometers, an internet platform where you can watch global statistics in real time. The figures are hurtling by, sometimes too fast to read them.
31 December 2017, midnight, Berlin time: world population is at 7,591,842,401. The seven billion five hundred ninety-one million eight hundred forty-two thousand four hundred first human just made it to be born by twelve midnight. Who, and where, might this new arrival be? And I am also thinking of something completely different: if we were to cut back on everything superfluous by one-half, globally and across the board for all the approx. 7.6 billion people on earth—and starting right now—that would be a fantastic and significant step! However, once the population doubles again, we’ll be back at the current rate of consumption of fossil resources.