When I was born, the gobal population was about 2.4-billion, all in.
Today we've grown to over six billion and that's expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today's six billion, two out of five, 41% don't have access to a latrine. That's 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.
Of course we don't have to imagine that, we don't have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to... well you know.
It's estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That's a lot of kids, isn't it?
Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can't turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.
Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There'll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.
Today we've grown to over six billion and that's expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today's six billion, two out of five, 41% don't have access to a latrine. That's 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.
Of course we don't have to imagine that, we don't have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to... well you know.
It's estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That's a lot of kids, isn't it?
Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can't turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.
Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There'll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.
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