For a sense of perspective with any discussion of sustainability or economic development, read on.

The Donella Meadows Archive
Voice of a Global Citizen - State of the Village Report

If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES
All you have to do is stop eating beef. Worldwide, beef production contributes more to climate change than the ­entire transportation sector. The carbon footprint of the average meat eater is about 1.5 tons of CO2 larger than that of a vegetarian. Cutting beef out of your diet will reduce your CO2 emissions by 2,400 pounds annually.
 
DRINK FROM THE TAP
You can save money and your environment by giving up bottled water. The production of plastic water bottles together with the privatization of our drinking water is an environmental and social catastrophe. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gasoline. The average American consumes 30 gallons of bottled water annually. Giving up one bottle of imported water means using up one less liter of fossil fuel and emitting 1.2 pounds less of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

OBSERVE AN ECO-SABBATH
For one day or afternoon or even one hour a week, don’t buy anything, don’t use any machines, don’t switch on anything electric, don’t cook, don’t answer your phone, and, in general, don’t use any resources. In other words, for this regular period, give yourself and the planet a break. Every hour per week that you live no impact cuts your carbon emissions by 0.6 percent annually. Commit to four hours per week, that’s 2.4 percent; do it for a whole day each week to cut your impact by 14.4 percent a year.

Many senior citizens, who thought they were set for life just six months ago, now face the prospect of going back to work, perhaps until they no longer can.  And these are the folks who did everything they were supposed to do—not poor planners.  They looked forward to that day when they could bid the world of work a fond farewell and ride off into the sunset of their golden years, rather than awake to find the wolf at the door

Here’s a classic example:  Imagine that you're 65 and you had saved $200,000 for your retirement when you were 50.  You watched your money grow at an average annual rate of 10% (the stock market's average return on investment), netting you a cool $1 million.  This was supposed to give you $40,000 a year to live on if you pulled out 4% each year.  But, still not that much money, right?  Social Security helped, and so did that job at Walmart.  You were getting by.  Besides, your house was paid for and it had gone up $150,000 in value.  We good, so far?

Then the real estate crash, followed by the stock market implosion, changes all of that almost overnight.  I read a story recently about a man who bought a new, three-bedroom $200,000 home in Maricopa, Arizona, in October 2005. He made a 35% down payment on his house and got a 15-year, fixed-rate mortgage at 5.75%. Today, the home is worth $80,000. His $70,000 down payment is now worthless.  This is an example of how even a cautious borrower can be hurt by a price collapse.

Richard Heinberg, author of “Peak Everything”, reviews the accelerating events since mid-2007 with Janaia Donaldson of Peak Moment Television, including the credit crunch and fossil fuel price volatility, noting that we’ve missed most of the best opportunities to manage collapse.