Today is the day the United Nations Population Fund has deemed the day most likely the world’s population hits the seven billion mark. We’ve just uploaded the video/podcast of our recent event, ‘Seven Billion: It’s Getting Crowded in Here!’, presented in partnership with the ABC and hosted by Radio National’s Natasha Mitchell (click the image below to watch the video).
In reality, it’s impossible to know where the seven billionth person will be born, but statistics favour India. The Fund’s State of World Population 2011 report has warned that a lack of investment in education, infrastructure and employment will stunt the life opportunities that would otherwise be potentially available to almost two billion young people across the world. The Guardian’s infographic tracing the history of human population begins 72 millennia ago.
It’s a subject we covered about three weeks ago but we’ve found a bunch more on the web to bring to your attention. The Herald Sun covered the story with an infographic that’s fun to play with. It graphs the rise in population from 1950 to the present day across the world, with the biggest rises in East and West Africa. The population of each of these regions now comfortably surpasses the billion mark.
In 1999, the Guardian invited Salman Rushdie to write a letter to the world’s six billionth person. Now, the newspaper has asked its readers to do the same. While it took only 12 years to jump from six to seven, the population growth rate is slowing. By mid-century, we should have topped nine billion, and by century’s end should only have grown one billion more. But the tiniest variation in fertility could see the 2100 mark hovering closer to 15 billion.
Meanwhile, this collection of photographs published on the Atlantic’s website brings home what would otherwise be a somewhat abstract milestone.
(Click to watch video.)
“This Halloween, give someone a scary book to read.” That’s the message Neil Gaiman is spreading this Halloween in a clip promoting All Hallow’s Read, an attempt to inaugurate a tradition in the UK of gift-giving every Halloween. Gaiman is an English author whose work crosses several generic divides: short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio plays and films. He’s best known for the comic book series, The Sandman, and he’s penned the novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline and The Graveyard Book.
Image from ‘Haunted Air’, a collection of photographs of late 19th century/early 20th century American folk Halloween costumes published by Random House
Traditionally, Halloween isn’t a tradition Australians have widely embraced. It seems to be a Christianised version of a Celtic harvest festival known as Samhain. While its popularity in Ireland and Scotland has dwindled, Irish and Scottish immigrants exported the holiday to North America, where it turned into an occasion for ritual mayhem.
Halloween costumes have tended to mirror the American cultural zeitgeist. Haunted Air is a new book by Ossian Brown published in Australia by Random House that gathers together photographs of folk Halloween costumes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The costumes reveal a visual culture that was more vivid and disturbing than that of today.
These days, what passes for scary often speaks volumes for our own prejudices – one law firm specialising in morgage foreclosures has gathered unwelcome publicity for staging a company Halloween party in which staff dressed as homeless people.
In fact, a group of students and teachers at Ohio University called STARS (Students Teaching About Racism in Society) have launched a campaign called ‘We’re a Culture, Not a Costume’. The campaign consists of a series of posters discouraging people from wearing Halloween costumes that draw on racial stereotypes. Here’s more.
