Word: agrarians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...planet sure seems smaller and smaller these days. The "wide-open spaces" that the Grammy-winning Dixie Chicks sing about are becoming few and far between. In little more than a century, humanity has gone from the agrarian age to the age of megacities. Four decades ago, there were only three cities with more than 8 million people: New York, London and Tokyo. By 2015 there will be 33 such cities, 27 of them--like Cairo--in the developing world...
...country to which they returned was a wasteland. Rwanda, a landlocked nation squeezed between Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo, has always been among the most crowded countries on earth--6.7 million people packed into a country the size of Vermont, not a good thing for an agrarian society whose primary economic unit is the family farm. The overpopulation is among the first things a visitor notices--and it has been cited as a sociological cause for the genocide. Rwanda is one of those countries, like India, where you are almost never out of sight of another human being...
...professional class. There were fewer than a dozen doctors within Rwanda's borders in 1997, and no more than 100 nurses. Hospitals were destroyed by retreating Hutu forces, as were power plants, factories and government buildings. The country that had once been a bastion of orderly if somewhat squalid agrarian capitalism was reduced to Stone Age living standards. In 1993, before the genocide, 53% of households were below the poverty line; by 1997, that figure had risen to more than 70%. Women's life expectancy was down to about age 43. "We needed to start from the beginning again," says...