6,000,000,000

Tonight there are six billion people out there on earth.

Six million people live in NYC: an area little larger then the hilltowns of Albany.

There are hundreds of millions of cars and trucks zooming around on our highways.

The oil consumed just by residents of Albany County tonight could fill a swimming pool the size of downtown Albany.

A single electric arc furnace, making steel from scrap metal, consume smore electricity then the City of Albany.

You consume 200 Kw/H electricity this month. That's nearly 250 lbs of coal. In a city of 100,000 that's 20,000 Mw/H of electricity and 25 millions lbs of coal or 12,500 tons of coal.

You throw away 3 1/2 lbs of trash today. The 300,000 residents of Albany County threw away 1,050,000 lbs of trash. That's some 525 tons of waste dumped today.

Residents of Albany County threw out enough aluminum this past week to build 2 1/2 jumbo-jets.

I really doubt most of us really know what a million or a billion really is. Everybody knows that they are really big numbers, usually describing proportions larger then humans. Even those of us who deal with big numbers day to day, describing societal economic choices or consumption patterns, probably do not understand the massive combined human effort, power, or resources they are pushing around through such numbers.

What is the impact on our collective lives by such consumption of resources? We can describe the impact as a whole as pollution, but our own little roles seem so small and irrelevant. We are living in a world bigger then human scale, where so much human will is put together in an almost uncompromisable fashion.