Dear LPG,

Coronavirus gave us lock-down which did not feel like a good thing at the time but the restrictions are being lifted slowly and all that spare time that we had on our hands is also beginning to disappear with it.  I have spent a lot of my lock-down time not being able to sleep at night and, for the want of something else to do in the small hours, Google and I have spent a lot of time in each other’s company.   When I was young I used to read under the covers but I have swapped a good book for a tablet these days and I thought and wrote about this issue a couple of weeks ago now, having stumbled upon three interesting facts.  I first read that if each person living on this world of ours was entitled to an equal share of its habitable land we would each have just under half an acre to call our own.

I then asked Alexa and found out that there are 4050 square meters in one acre.  This got the cogs in the mathematical bit of my brain working as I calculated that, in theory and very roughly, in the light of our changing (and rising) world population, the vast majority of us are getting somewhat short-changed when it comes to our fair share of real estate.   

I took a look at another set of online statistics which inform that the average house in the UK is built upon about 70 square metres of land which falls well short of the 2000 or so meters that I have worked out would belong to each of us in a fairer world.  I know that we also need fields, parks, shops, churches, clubs, football fields, roads and so many other community facilities, but even if we each gave half of our even share for those facilities, we should be still left with about 1000 square metres each. I then started thinking about how unfair the balance between the have and have nots really is.  Where there are a few people who lay claim to countless blocks of land, and while so many of us have an average allocation to call our own, what of the people who live in flats, who share one room, and have even less space than that to themselves? 

Then Google revealed yet another bit of arguably useless information to me.   Amongst the many other celebrations that July 11^th offers, and if LPG prints this on the right day, today is world population day; a day to acknowledge or disagree with the relevant scientists and statisticians who dedicate their time to looking at and planning for many much bigger issues than my thoughts provoked during that particular google session.

 I know that most of the readers of LPG are well past the age when we would be able to contribute to this particular problem anymore but, if nothing else, this awareness day should get us all thinking about what can be done to make sure that our theoretically-equal personal allotment of land doesn’t shrink too much more, because our world population is still growing alarmingly quickly.

SC, Catford

SC shares what Google shared with him…

(►►►)   (►►►)     (►►►)