Jonathan Meiburg: A New Kind of Refugee
The world, however, seems to resist nothing so much as staying the same. A few months ago I was startled to read that Virginia Woolf, in 1928, casually referred to the world population of two billion people as if it were a large number. My grandfather, I realized, was a toddler when she said this, and for some reason this fact, more than any chart or graph I've ever seen, brought home the strangeness of the reality that eighty years later, within a single human lifetime, we are now at nearly seven billion people, headed for nine. An unprecedented thing has happened, but outside of UN conferences, we don't really think or talk about it much in our daily lives, even as it looms over us.
