Redefine Poverty

We desperately need a new conception of poverty. We need it to prevent the destruction of our planet, our one and only home. We need it more than we need solar power, more than we need organic food, more than we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To embrace this new conception of poverty would be to embrace these important moves and more. It would be truly revolutionary.

Currently civilized humans view poverty as our greatest enemy, a thing that must be banished from the earth. Mention poverty and most people think of the filthy family, often with dark skin, thin from undernourishment, in the small run-down shack with no rooms and worse, no appliances or television, cooking over a fire and eating mostly vegetables. People shudder that they should end up in such a situation. They will climb over anyone, invest their money anywhere, do anything to prevent themselves dropping into poverty. It is one of the scariest fates in the world.

Or so we are told.

What we need is more poverty. Poverty is sustainable, our current lifestyle is not. One definition of poverty is telling: the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions. In our culture poverty is about not having stuff. You're not actually suffering when you can't buy that new computer, no matter what the advertisements say.

If every person on earth lived like the average North American we would need several earths to provide for these people's appetites: private vehicle, meat-based diet, extremely large home, energy to heat during cold months and cool during warm months, countless and continuous possessions. We don't have several earths, we only have one home and we share it with many other beings. We can no longer deny that our lifestyle is destructive and must be abandoned.

I know a man who grows most of his own food and rarely earns a wage. He barters for what he needs and recognizes, as I do, that humans need three simple things: food, shelter and community. Beyond that is excess. He would be considered in poverty if you asked the state. He likely makes somewhere around the $2 a day that is the World Bank's criteria for being in poverty. But he is healthy, well fed, self-sufficient with a roof over his head. If more people would live like him, climate change might not even be a concern and more people would actually be healthy instead of self-destructive as this culture teaches.

So I'd like to propose a new conception of poverty. You are in poverty if you do not eat healthy nutritious food that you mostly produced yourself. You are in poverty if you do not have a humble and clean space to call your own, a place that keeps you warm during the cold months. You are in poverty if you pollute your body with chemicals and eat animals that were ill-treated during their lives. You are in poverty if you do not live in a supportive and respectful community of humans, people who understand and respect reciprocity. You are in poverty if you don't realize that you are already beautiful. You are in poverty if you don't see the link between your survival and that of the land. You are in poverty if your goal in life is to gather small pieces of paper that have no value beyond what people with guns tell us they have. You are more in poverty with the more things that you acquire.