Ending poverty and protecting the planet are not incompatible

Today is Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers around the world are dedicating posts to one topic – in today’s case, poverty.

Here at the Footprint, we’re weighing in with some thoughts on poverty and the environment.

Can we eliminate – or, more realistically, diminish – poverty, while protecting the environment from further destruction?

Theoretically, yes.

More saliently, on the local level – here in Arizona, for instance – what the hell can we do that’s going to make a mouse fart’s worth of difference?

A lot, I think. And much of that will take place at the intersection of the human and natural world, in our cities. How we design our communities often sets the stage for the worst manifestations of urban poverty — and environmental waste.

(probably the most brilliant take on this phenomenon is Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz“.)

Much of Arizona’s growth in the last thirty years makes for a perfect microcosm of much of what I think went wrong in the 20th century in terms of sustainable urban planning. We have created a fragmented, stratified society that heavily taxes the environment, often for no discernable reason.

We’ve got traffic jams, sprawl up the wazoo, suburbs and exurbs as far as the eye can see, and some long-term water issues that could leave us seriously fucked sometime in the next couple of decades.

We’ve also got poverty issues – our education system is ranked near the bottom in the U.S., our prisons are growing faster than pretty much anywhere else in the country, and the foreclosure debacle is sucking tens of thousands of families down the financial drain.

Right here in Tucson, about one out of five families fall under the federal poverty line, scraping by on about $19,000 a year.

Now, since we can’t exactly scrap the society we’ve inherited and start from scratch – though it would be much easier that way– we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

We’ve essentially got to retro-fit our existing, unsustainable, inequitable world into something that works a little better for all of us, and for the planet.

On a societal level, that means more spending on public transportation, affordable housing, health and nutrition programs, education, green energy and sustainable, local agriculture.

Local, grassroots activism, that produce small but tangible victories, are also the key. One group working toward that goal in Tucson is Just Communities Inc. Check them out here.

It also means embracing community autonomy – as in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy – and breaking this generation and the next’s addiction to consumer goods that, let’s face it, are an infantile substitution for much more fundamental human longings – for things like belonging, love and personal fulfillment – anyway.

Poverty in America is, after all, not really about scarcity. It is about the equitable – or inequitable – distribution of what we have. And compared much of the rest of the world, we have plenty.

And despite the proclamation of pundits and politicians, the solution to our problems is not always “growing the economy,” particularly when it comes at the expense of our environment and our communities. What we need is equilibrium — balance and harmony.

This is a topic that’s been on my mind for a long time, so I’ll be revisiting it again in the near future. Until then, via con dios, good night and good luck.

John Collins Rudolf

(Photo credit: moi)

updated Oct. 16
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