THE POVERTY OF THE RICHAND THE POVERTY OF THE POOR

hese are reflections about poverty in our world -- voluntary and involuntary, real and symbolic -- the kind that brutalizes, and the kind that would renew the face of the earth. T

They come from years of living with very poor people in very ex-otic places, all part of what’s called the Third World. They represent my flailing efforts to put into communicable terms what remains a mute emotional singularity for me: the impact of what I saw fused with the shock of returning home. It’s happened many times; the first was in 1964. I was 25 years old. I never got over it.

I’ve lived in Peru, Puerto Rico, the American inner city (another third world location), Mexico, Central America, and now Appalachia. My wife Mary was in Chile for three years, and through her stories I feel I’ve been touched by that experience as well. The extraordinary people who lived so far from my “home”, pushed me beyond my stereotyped definitions of poor and rich, good and bad. They forced me into seeing the world without shopping malls and suburban subdivi-sions, interstates and office buildings, and without the peculiar anguish that paradoxically accompanies so many of the careers we in the First World call “work” that in fact have no direct bearing on basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Ultimately, they opened me into imagining a new world, a new society and way of life that I believe would be bet-ter for all of us.

I say “us” emphatically because if at one time in the distant past I ever thought of myself as helping “them”, I do so no longer. The poor have taught me that we in the First World have more to learn than to teach, more to ask for than to give. I’ll go even further. It’s my opin-ion that they offer us a model to live by, a model that can sustain our staggering world. But I worry that the model is fading, as the Third World turns inexorably in the direction we have laid out for them.

Such a range of locations as I mention here might at first seem per-plexing. But my life was once dedicated to Institutional Religion and its self-proclaimed “missions”. I severed that institutional connection thirty years ago, but the sense of mission remained, as I believe, trans-formed into something more docile, more awestruck -- more sacred.

I was supported in that difficult transition by visionary religious and political movements that promote the highest ideals of solidarity based on our common immersion in a Sacred Matrix. They provided a fo-cused energy that continues to influence my life. These movements and the great, suffering idealists who trudged in their parade spoke of Poverty in ways that shattered the categorical stereotypes.

They claimed it could change the world.

I. Where we are begin with where I am, because where I’ve been led me here. Mary and I live on a farm in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I grow food, some of which we sell and some of which we eat.

Mary works an outside job and shares with the farming as she can.I

Farming doesn’t say it all, but it says what, for me, is the central core. We have seven acres of grapes. Two years ago, when the big Château that used to buy our grapes told us we were too small for their newly expanded processing equipment, we decided to become a li-censed commercial winery ourselves, much smaller, of course. I con-sider wine a food but frankly, I would rather have simply farmed. Be-coming a winery was a compromise to stay afloat.

We used to grow an acre of spectacular unsprayed broccoli every year also, about 5,000 head. That would not qualify us for agribusi-ness, to be sure, but it earned enough to offer hope that a larger planting might actually provide us a modest living. But it was not to be. After five years, the ever-increasing deer population that share these hills with us discovered, almost overnight it seems, the benefits of broccoli, and abruptly eliminated the income from that crop. That awakened primitive desires for vengeance that, sublimated, became an added in-centive for our enological venture.

We also have 250 blueberry bushes, planned as a “U-Pick” opera-tion. They never produced more than a small harvest when the spring frosts were merciful; and, even if we put in more, we could see that they would not support the farm. And so the winery. It’s not what we intended, but with it, perhaps, we may at least continue to farm. Time will tell. In the meantime, we depend on outside work, which also gives us health insurance.

A local wine enthusiast heard my reasons for starting to sell wine. She was appalled. “You mean you started the winery because you wanted to make money?” Well, I wouldn’t have put it like that. She

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apparently had fantasized that winemakers are “artists” lost in the pas-sionate grip of gastronomic creativity. Another victim of wine-hype, I thought. Yes, I enjoy and make a good wine; but no, I’m not a gourmet. My motive is to keep the farm going. Sorry.

We were lucky. We bought our 48 acre farm-with-house 12 years ago for about what a brand new, full-sized four-by-four diesel pick-up truck costs today. We live as simply as our circumstances permit, given the demands of contemporary American society, with which we are determined to stay connected. That resolution is not rhetorical. We realize that our projected life-style could easily marginate us. We live in a society based on another model. Many think we are isolated any-way, in spite of our efforts. We are different from most Americans; we try to sustain ourselves directly by our own work and resources. This is quite intentional.

Some examples: We logged our own woodlot ourselves for lumber; we do our own carpentry and cabinetry, electrical and plumbing work, repair of vehicles and machinery, and the farming, processing and mar-keting. We cut, split and burn our own wood for winter fuel. We grow and preserve the food that we eat, vegetables, fruit, chickens at times, and the occasional venison (all the more delicious de venganza). We make bread, cheese and of course, wine. We are trying to follow, in the context of our time and place in the world, a model suggested by the Third World peasants we’ve known -- and our gurus of voluntary poverty.

We are gratified that we have been able to pursue these ideals, but we don’t kid ourselves about what we’ve actually accomplished. We depend on outside work. We don’t always have the tools and experi-ence to turn our subsistence labors into efficient skills. We are slow and awkward. We depend on the advice of our neighbors who toil pro-fessionally at these crafts; and we count on the support of our friends. In a real sense, we are not self sufficient at all. But we are attempting this in the context of a society which functions on a different dynamic altogether.

“Do one thing well ...”

I’ve been told that my grandfather, whom I never knew, emigrated from Sicily at the turn of the century with a philosophy of work: “Learn to do one thing well, earn your living from it, and buy every-thing else. That’s the way the new world is.” He was putting European

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peasant society behind him. He knew what made modern industrial so-ciety tick.

I know it too. But I think you can go too far with that way of think-ing. I believe in its extreme form it can make those of us who are locked into its machinery, narrow, truncated, undeveloped, unfulfilled and dependent in ways that atrophy our abilities and annul our free-doms. The industrial model is not just a simple “division of labor”. It’s a compartmentalized conception of society and an over-rationalized view of human nature that in practice denies certain fundamental as-pects of our humanity, and therefore distorts us, dis-integrates us.

For one thing, it tends to forget that we humans are, inescapably, physical organisms, bodies. I believe as bodies we were made to work -- physically, strenuously -- in order to survive as we are. And when we don’t work hard, apart from all other considerations, it makes us sick. Ironically, the doctors tell us that we have to imitate hard work with vigorous exercise in order to maintain or regain our health. Fur-thermore, I believe the desire and decision to escape from this basic natural responsibility is what creates the demand for slaves, human and mechanical. We plunder the labor of others or create machines to meet our needs so we can pursue “other” endeavors. I wonder if this could be the source of our troubles, the “original sin” of our technological so-ciety, the tragic flaw of the modern world. How would it be if each did their own work, were their own slave?

Human beings are the product of the forests of Paleolithic times. We might prefer that weren’t true. But it determines what our bodies require. It conditions our nutritional needs, the limits of our environ-mental tolerances, our social and intellectual reflexes, and our sense of Sacred Awe. All this may change eventually with the slow sculpturing of evolution under the influence of the society we have created -- but that will take a very long time. Someday, in a future calculated on a geologic scale, we may develop immunity to the chemicals and con-taminants that presently are the known causes of the cancers that, in-creasingly, are killing us. Someday we may come to thrive on a pool of nutritional elements that, as we are now, do not support a healthy life. Someday our mental-emotional needs may no longer plunge us into profound depression when we are faced with the unsatisfying and often repulsive work and career goals offered by modern industrial society. Maybe someday we’ll be different.

But as we are today and into the foreseeable future, we can say that the industrial model disregards our intelligence and stultifies us. The

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minutely apportioned division of labor that is the hallmark of the tech-nological process, goes well beyond the balanced cooperation imagined by my grandfather. (His vision may owe more to village life than he might have been willing to admit). The industrial mode partitions the worktask into such monotonous repetitive routines that it cripples the worker mentally. The mindless mechanization on which our economy is built, robs any substance or security from grandpa’s idealized picture of divided work. There is, in fact, nothing to learn, so everyone is in-stantly replaceable. To my nonno, I would respond, if I could, “I think it’s better to use your mind to learn as many things as well as you can, take care of yourself by doing them, and then go help your neighbor do the same.” This is not meant to deny a place for specialized skills. But it’s a different model of work for a different model of society.

Views like these are potentially marginating. I’m well aware that this intended lifestyle stands in patent contradiction of the economic patterns that characterize contemporary society. I try to live out my ideals of self-sufficient labor, but few agree with me, and avoiding iso-lation necessarily involves compromise, maybe too much. It hardly needs saying that by all appearances our farming project, if its purpose was to engage and recruit others, seems to have had little effect besides its own survival.

Those who question our efforts say, “get real”, there is no alterna-tive to what mainstream society offers.

No alternative?

The opportunity of choosing one’s own lifestyle is, most assuredly, one of the privileges of living in the First World. Such choices are only possible where there’s a certain amount of economic autonomy. And that depends more on the general wealth of the community, than on a specific instance of personal affluence. It’s a characteristic of the First World. Many, many First Worlders have that opportunity. Some, for sure, because of poverty, responsibilities or closed doors, do not. They are like Third Worlders; their options are limited and they have to sur-vive.

I address myself rather to those of us who benefit from the wealth of the First World, like young students among many others, who do have a choice. They may very well be looking for a way to avoid the in-sipid, meaningless and humanly mutilating routines, the jobs they call “work”, and the rewards they call “wealth” that loom before their lives like towers of welded chains. I am definitely wanton enough to seduce

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them if I could, to try a way-of-life that engages all their powers and capacities to the full, challenges them to dominate technology and sub-ordinate it to real needs, gives them hard work for their strong bodies, keeps them close to our earth and the companion species (yes, even the deer) with whom we humans share life -- and the Unknowable Source of all this. I would say to them, with minimum initial skills, such a life is immediately guaranteed to keep you alive, eating healthy food, get-ting natural exercise, with access to pure water and air. Nor would you have to relinquish the great pursuits that have enlivened humanity through the ages: proficiency in technical and interpersonal skills, sci-ence, creativity in the arts and music, the quest for knowledge, wisdom, and the face of the Sacred. This way of life connects you to the whole human race, and can serve as an excellent support base for what is the great call of your generation: the Promethean task of global economic transformation.

So, to those with choice, I say, choose wisely. Ponder long and hard before you choose “career” and “wealth”. Don’t choose the American dream; choose another dream. I suggest there is a lifestyle choice for the First World that will support the dream of justice. It may feel like you’re choosing poverty, and they may try to scare you with that. But quiet as it’s kept (a little known secret), you will never really be poor.

Don’t be afraid. You’re stronger than you think. And your human-ity is yours, not your parents’, not your partner’s, not your children’s, to challenge, to explore, to donate. Don’t sell yourself short. Far from joining the frog-throated chorus of the professional protectors of the status quo who repeat endlessly that such an escapade might grow you Pinocchio’s nose, I am quite capable of conjuring another story, an-other dream: that with this adventure you may change the world -- and keep the world from changing you.

But, relax; there’s no hurry. Take your time and prepare yourself. This offer is unlimited.

I would love to pass the torch to the new generation. If it weren’t for so much apparent lack of success, perhaps I wouldn’t feel driven to write these reflections. I had always hoped this way of life would speak for itself and carry the weight of its own argument, persuading by proof, by example, by its fruits. But now I’m not sure that’s going to happen. Perhaps it’s because there’s been so much compromise. Or maybe with retirement age looming, there always come these misgiv-ings and a sense of failure. So many have told us through the years that these “ideas” weren’t “real”, they were never anything more than ro-

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mantic dreams. Grandpa, after all, never returned to Sicily, not even for a visit; and they say he never looked back.

The young people will have to decide for themselves, which “dream” is worth living for, more transforming, more real. Maybe these reflections will help influence their decision.

Bodies, Food, LaborHow did I get here anyway?Some of our friends might say it was probably our eight year experi-

ence living and working among the peasant people of Mexico and Cen-tral America. They were subsistence farmers, eking out of the land -- owned by very few, sharecropped by most -- a very meager existence. They grew food. Some they sold and some they ate. But for the vast majority who didn’t own their own land, not only a share of their crop, but a great portion of their labor had to be dedicated to the patron on whose land they lived and for whom they toiled, working in coffee and cotton, bananas and avocados. Yes, they were paid, if you can call it that. In Mexico even today an agricultural worker can ordinarily ex-pect to be paid less than $5 for an entire day’s labor. This money, such as it is, might be used for shoes, clothing, perhaps a small radio, tools or other items they were incapable of growing or making themselves.

Agricultural wages are market-generated. I cite these wages to point out how poor these poor countries really are. I remember how shocked I was when I first discovered that even though wages were so low, the price of beans, the staple of their diet, in US dollar terms was the same as it was in the States, at that time about .50¢ a pound. This is true for most foods. Before going to LatinAmerica, I had been under the impression that wage disparities were relative to local cost-of-liv-ing. Where wages are higher, it’s because prices are higher; lower wages are usually balanced by lower prices. This was not true; and it’s still not true. Self-subsistent agriculture, a preference for me, for them was a necessity. They wouldn’t survive without it.

They were allowed to farm a plot on the land they occupied, grow-ing their own food, corn, beans, squash, perhaps yucca or some toma-toes. They may have chickens, less often a pig or a cow. They lived from hand to mouth, we used to say. The problem, as they identify it, is land. They need land. A village leader in an impoverished Mexican ejido reminded me, “the peasant wants land so he can feed his family.” You wouldn’t think he had to say it. But for some reason it always comes as a revelation to us.

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In southern Mexico in 1981, I had been invited by the local Catholic diocese to teach driving and basic vehicle maintenance to indigenous people from that same ejido. On one occasion, I was walking along a precipitous mountain trail with a group of men, and I was overwhelmed by the majestic vista of the cliff we were on, plunging into a boulder-filled gorge below. “This land is beautiful,” I said. They looked at me quizzically. They have a different sense of beauty. When the peasant says land is beautiful, he means it will grow food. There is no other consideration. Cliffs and rocks do not grow food.

Of course they respond to beauty, as we do. Their mud and stick homes are adorned with pictures that represent their dreams and vi-sions. Curiously for us, however, they rarely include the countryside. Perhaps it’s because the countryside is their factory and assembly-line. They are immersed in it everyday. It represents endless toil to them, the exploitation of their labor, disenfranchisement from what was once theirs, frustration and starvation. When I said “beautiful”, they laughed.

We, educated First Worlders, take food for granted. We claim we have more important things to think about. We seem to forget we are our bodies and our bodies need food. It almost appears that we are re-luctantly human, always ambivalent about having bodies, often living as if we didn’t. Sometimes our ambivalence turns into disdain; we abuse our bodies, despising what we really are, in favor of some imagi-nary thing that doesn’t exist.

Food corresponds to the needs of our bodies. If we don’t think our bodies, such as they are, are important, we are not going to think food is important either. And if we are the kind that are ready to exploit the weaknesses of others, the bodily need for food can be used as a means of coercion and subjugation. Empires are built on such readiness. God forgive us.

Our bodies are the very core of our reality. How we handle this “problem” will determine our destiny. The stratification and criminal violence that characterizes our global society, threatening at every mo-ment to explode in fury, is ultimately due to the exploitation of our weak flesh. Our bodies are the locus of the necessities that shackle us to the earth. They make us weak, vulnerable and afraid. It is from this that all violent coercion, slavery and socially generated poverty derives. (And from there also will come our liberation.)

Food; we all need food. But food has to be grown, picked, raised, slaughtered, cleaned -- and of course cooked. Food requires labor.

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And that completes the circle of our captivity. Bodies, Food, Labor. The labor spent growing and processing food seems to be held in a dis-esteem that corresponds to the disregard we seem to have for our bod-ies. It is considered the lowest form of work, least paid, longest hours, worst conditions, least safe, least secure, totally unappreciated. Women everywhere, their destiny linked eternally to food, have always known this. Our otherwise xenophobic immigration policies display a surprisingly open hospitality when it comes to allowing foreign labor-ers -- temporarily -- to enter our fields and orchards to do the work we, middle class Americans, feel is beneath us. We relegate farm labor to those we consider inferior. And even when there is no ethnic prejudice, we ridicule agricultural people once we find out what they do. Why is that? Why of all the human occupations does the growing of food pro-voke such disdain in us?

Even so, in spite of prejudice and disrespect, a Mexican agricultural laborer who can work in the States for $7 an hour, would have to toil almost two full days in Mexico to match it. So, it should come as no surprise that many will risk their dignity, liberty and even their life to enter the US, legally or illegally, to earn a living incomparable to any-thing they could hope for in Mexico. The billions of dollars sent by these workers to their families back home, accounts for a significant portion of the National Income of Mexico and the Central American Republics. In Mexico, annual remittances are the second largest source of national income -- second only to tourism. i Can we, here in the US, ever imagine ourselves in such a state of dependency, personally, na-tionally? I don’t think so.

All this seems distant and unreal to many of us. Sometimes we joke about it. But for much of the world, this is the real world; and the way we live is the fantasy.

Catholic Political Radicalism.But people who know us may rather identify the source of our “back

to the land” lifestyle with political and religious ideology. In my early thirties, I lived at the Catholic Worker Farm in New York’s Hudson River Valley and then at another similar farm in southern Pennsylvania for a total of five years. Both were intentional communities inspired by parallel branches of a Catholic social radicalism born in the 30’s. These movements, in spite of their names, were not part of the official church structure, and in fact, were more often the object of its criticism and disclaimers. The Catholic Worker is the more familiar. It is usu-

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ally identified with Dorothy Day, but its commitment to farming stems from her associate, a little-known man named Peter Maurin. He saw the Great Depression as the failure of the Industrial Model. Relying on it had made untold numbers homeless and sent them adrift to populate the skid rows of the big American cities. He suggested the launching of farming communities to give work to the armies of unemployed. The Farms were intended to bring together “workers and scholars” for their mutual benefit; each would teach the other, and the uselessly over-educated “unemployed college graduates”, created by a system that didn’t work, would re-learn the basic skills needed for survival: food, clothing, shelter. In the social disruption of the thirties, that was con-sidered neither an idle nor idealistic project. Farming communities based on this philosophy shared the common elements of agriculture, spirituality and social transformation, what Maurin called “cult, culture and cultivation”. In the Maurin vision, it was the poor and unemployed themselves who would accomplish a “green revolution” peacefully, by creating a “new society within the shell of the old”, returning to the simplicity of the European peasant community Maurin, and my grand-father, had grown up in.ii

If you’ve noticed an unmistakable similarity in these sources of in-spiration, so have I. And that’s what we have tried to synthesize in our lifestyle. It’s important to us, however, that what we are doing not be confused, because of superficial resemblance, with something that it’s not. We are not hippies. We are not exempting ourselves from the problems of our times -- not at all.

We are not yuppies either. But, we are certainly not the only ones to recognize the human benefits of simple country living. Virgil, Ho-race, Juvenal, Roman poets of the first century CE, extolled simple ru-ral life and set it in opposition to the corruptions and excesses that en-tered Rome, the City, along with the astronomical wealth of Empire. The poets recognized that country life had a healthy and healing effect which they saw in personal not political terms. Many seek individual fulfillment of this type. Throughout the Appalachian region, affluent retirees construct modern homes in the beautiful mountain hollows abandoned years ago by penniless “hillbillies” who went to the big cities to look for work. The irony of it all! That simple rural life, de-meaned the world over as the nadir of backwardness and squalor, should have become the great goal of the elites of our economic sys-tem. Yes, simple rural living is universally recognized as “the good life”. We absolutely agree. There is a refined pleasure here often iden-

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tified with contemplative serenity: the ideal of the ancient world. But the vision projected by the farming movements that inspired us was dif-ferent; it went further. It was grounded in a mysticism that embraced the earth and all its people. What that embrace hungered for was noth-ing less than personal and social transformation. And a life full of such strange ambitions is not always serene.

For their part, I believe the Catholic Worker and similar movements are modern re-expressions of the same visionary aspirations that have surfaced repeatedly in the history of the West. The monastic orders that derived from the Benedictine and Franciscan traditions, which, at their inception were clearly rebellions against a stratified status quo, have for many centuries espoused communitarianism, simplicity of life, voluntary poverty, and self-supporting agriculture as a lifestyle that would both fulfill the person and transform society. Ora et labora, pray and work, was the central admonition of Benedict’s Rule, written in the 6th century. And Christian monasticism inherited its patterns from earlier communitarian efforts, family-based as well as monastic, that were Jewish, Persian and Greek.

The radical German Reformed tradition that produced a revolution-ary communitarian groundswell of the peasantry in the aftermath of the Lutheran revolt in the 16th century, is another example. The Amish, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren and other such groups have all come from that peasant tradition and maintain it still, albeit each with their respective degree of unavoidable compromise. Simplicity of life, if not voluntary poverty figure prominently in their program. These family-based communities are rooted in agriculture and cooperative egalitarianism, grounded in a sense of the Sacred. The ancestors of many of the people who are local to our Appalachian region were of that tradition.

So the Catholic Worker is only one instance of these aspirations that have been espoused in the West through the millennia. If we can ab-stract from the repressive purposes to which religion has been fre-quently put, we may see that these ideals are an expression of the perennial thirst for justice on the part of the peasant poor, the distilla-tion of centuries of fidelity to communitarian struggle. Simplicity of life, voluntary poverty, agriculture, cooperative communitarianism, so-cial and economic transformation. I believe they are the Great Coun-sels of our tradition.

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II. Economic TransformationThe Poverty of the Poor

conomic transformation. Third World poverty is not a romantic abstraction, nor, in the first instance, a spiritual ascesis. It’s not even, in spite of its real and enduring potential, a sustaining

self-subsistence. Third World poverty as it presently reigns, is destruc-tive, mutilating and inhuman. It is also unnecessary. It is the socially preventable deprivation of the basic sustenance needed to live a human life.

EThe peasants’ need for land, for example, is not symbolic, it is real.

Without it their children will starve. But this problem is preventable. There is plenty of land; but they are denied it. Movements for agrarian reform in Latin America -- that would transfer under-utilized land to the use of the poor -- have been routinely branded a “communist con-spiracy” and met with unbridled criminal violence by those who cur-rently control the land along with their Imperial associates and protec-tors. Sometimes under intense pressure, peasant demands are reluc-tantly acceded to, given a rhetorical, bureaucratic and legislative exis-tence but ultimately left abandoned and un-applied. iii In Mexico this has taken the form of an ejido (rural cooperative) system that has been crippled (in land quality, water access and credit) by official corruption in league with the big landowners. In Honduras, land-takeovers by the landless poor occur with annual regularity because land-reform legisla-tion is regularly ignored. Land inequity crassly maintained by vicious upper class repression has been the one common identifiable factor un-derlying all the revolutionary movements in Central America for the past forty years.

Revolutions are desperate attempts at making the serious structural change required for economic transformation. They stem from an in-tolerable frustration, and the way their demands erupt makes that un-mistakably clear. The poor are desperate. Many people who are not involved in this experience have allowed themselves to be persuaded by the spin-doctors of the status quo that these revolutions are the work of “outside agitators”, exploiting simple people who would otherwise be content with their lot. This is a blindness so crass and indefensible that one suspects complicity in the deception. We are dealing here, rather, with a profound and humanly destructive poverty, coldly main-tained without redress, that cries out to be confronted, and transformed. When transformation is blocked, the “blow-back” is revolution.

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Economic transformation. What is it that the poor want? If the de-sired transformation could take place, what would that look like? Many consider such a question a “no-brainer”. It is assumed that the goal of economic transformation is a simple equation -- Third World parity with the First World. But with very little reflection we realize the issue is complex. On the one hand, in a world of limited resources, we might expect that First World nations will resist allowing the poor to reach parity; for it will mean their once privileged access to the goods of the earth will have to end. On the other hand, if there are any doubts, from the point of view of planetary overload, about the way we live here in the First World, it will call into question the unexamined assumptions about the very possibility and therefore, the desirability of parity for the poor

The EnvironmentThe primary factor that disrupts the parity equation is the environ-

ment. No discussion about parity can occur without taking into ac-count the limited resources of planet-earth and the environmental degradation which is progressively destroying life-support systems and eliminating living species, at an ever increasing pace even as we speak. These immense problems seem to suggest, rather than making the poor rich, the ultimate solution may lie in making the rich poor.

I’m aware that by saying that so abruptly, this core position might be missed. So let me repeat it in other words, slowly. The problems of the environment clearly imply that the entire world must come to grips with the limitations of our small planet, and arrive at a formula for ex-traction, consumption and pollution that is sustainable over the very long run. This formula will apply to everyone without exception and so it will necessarily demand a significant reduction in the consumption habits of the First World. Any reduction in consumption, however, will be considered by the First World not only an impoverishment, but an attack on our “way of life”. And it will be resisted.

Many claim my assessment is too dire, that planning for parity can legitimately be based on sustainable growth. But I believe that the no-tion of sustainable growth is a mainstream illusion, a fantasy, a subcon-scious concession to the so-called “reality” that says no one will volun-tarily accept any retreat from present levels of consumption. In my view, it is “sustainable growth” that is the “romantic dream”. I claim growth is not possible without mutilating the current living profile of the planet. I cite as evidence the fact that the earth’s main life support

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systems, atmosphere, water, ozone, temperature, living species of all kinds, are already in deterioration and measurable decline due to cur-rent levels of consumption. It is a simple exercise in logic that if the graph is running on a downslope for all these systems, that direction will not (cannot) change while current conditions remain in place. It seems to me the burden of proof is on those who are defending contin-ued growth. Decline is factually in possession. Turnarounds are big things. And the “market” is not going to turn things around. I would ask the partisans of growth on what realistic, foreseeable (and presum-ably massive) changes they base their hopes for a turnaround. Maurice Strong says, “... scientists are telling us that carbon emissions must be cut by at least 60% just to get the warming trend on hold.” iv There is no such prospect on the horizon. The World Bank reports,

Environmental conditions have also deteriorated in many places across the planet and will worsen if present trends continue. Nearly 2 million hectares of land worldwide (23 percent of all cropland, pasture, forest, and woodland) have been degraded since the 1950s. ... Two-thirds of all fisheries are exploited at or beyond their sustainable limits, and half or more of the world’s coral reefs may perish in this century. Every decade, another 5 percent of tropical forests is cleared. More than a third of terrestrial biodiversity is squeezed into habitat fragments covering just 1.4 percent of the Earth’s surface and could vanish if those fragments are lost.v

The WorldWatch Institute’s State of the World 2000, restates that last point in these terms:

... the trend that will most affect the human prospect is an irreversible one -- the accelerating extinction of plant and animal species. The birds mammals and fish that are vulnerable or in immediate danger of extinction is now measured in double digits: 11% of the world’s birds, 25% of the world’s mammals and an estimated 34% of all fish species. The leading cause of species loss is habitat destruction ... As more and more species disappear, local ecosystems begin to collapse; at some point we will face wholesale ecosystem collapse.vi

Some scientists estimate that as many as 137 species disappear from the Earth each day, which adds up to an astounding 50,000 species dis-appearing every year.vii

Further growth of any kind will simply continue this trend. I ac-cuse those who fantasize a future of continuous growth, of being quietly willing to contemplate a world exclusively adapted to human use -- and radically modified from its present state. They are, in fact, prepared to preside over the disappearance of most forms of

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life other than our own. We may not survive such a catastrophe. But, even if we could, I am not willing to accept such a “solution”.

Growth. The cessation of growth is stasis. At the present time, the stasis needed for sustainability, not only does not exist, there is little to indicate that it is even contemplated. Stasis, zero-growth, is considered an undesirable quality. Our system demands constant growth. And so we’ve seen that maintaining the perception of growth, even if it means deceptive accounting procedures, has become an important part of stan-dard business practice.

Growth? Resources are, even now, stretched to the breaking point, and the situation would be much worse except for the lower levels of consumption in the Third World, in other words, except for the poverty of the poor. This is important, so let me restate: Whatever moderation, however unintended, our planetary exploitation currently enjoys is co-incidental and due to an imbalance between the consumption habits of the rich and those of the poor. In this matter the First World is depen-dent on the Third World. Thus, we have an eroding account balance with mother earth, bought at the price of the massive inequity of Third World poverty, maintained by violence and inherently unstable. Revo-lutions and other such attempts at redress, are the manifestations of that instability. So, for the sake of stability, the First World, in spite of hav-

iNPR, All Things Considered, Gerry Hadden, “Mexican Emigrants”, July 29, 2002.iiPeter Maurin, Easy Essays, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1977, (Origi-nally pub.1936, 1949) passimiiiCf Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, W.W. Norton, NY, 2002, p.81ivMaurice Strong, Ch. “Passage from Rio”, in Millennium ed. by Mayur & Her-nandez, IISF, India. 1998 p.33vWorld Bank, World Development Report 2003, “Overview”, p.8viLester Brown, Ch. “Challenges of the New Century”, in Worldwatch Institute Report: State of the World 2000 , W.W.Norton, NY, 2000, p.8. He cites 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals, Gland, Switzerland: World Conserva-tion Union - IUCN, 1996viiRainForest Action Network website: <http://www.ran.org/> citing: Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; Cf also, Global Biodiversity Assessment. UNEP. Cambridge University Press, 1995

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ing created this inequity and being its principal beneficiary, is forced to address it. The attempt to address inequity is called “development”.

Development and the Third WorldThe dubious goal of most officialist “development” thinking that I'm

aware of, is parity -- to bring the Third World to the outrageous level of consumption and production of the First World. I say “outrageous”, because the earth cannot long sustain the depletion of resources necessary to maintain the present level of consumption, much less what would be required of a planetary population with a middle class lifestyle. A report from the World Bank puts it in a terse tautology, “Overconsumption creates an unsustainable demand for resources.”viii

So we have the classic dilemma. Under current conditions, if we confront inequity, we forfeit sustainability. If we promote sustainability, we retain inequity. And the illusion of sustainable growth was created to deny the dilemma.

They deny the dilemma. From the IMF and the World Bank, the official paradigm is “industrial and commercial development” which means the growth of big business as we know it. Such growth is built on the base of an expanding buying power and consumer spending among the population of the target country. It would turn the people that it benefits into overconsumers like us. (This corresponds to the first horn of the dilemma). And even when this plan works, it only works for some. Where these “miracles” have occurred they have created deeper divisions between the rich and poor; they do not eliminate mass poverty.

But in any case, under IMF management, such “miracles” are rare, and it’s no wonder. Loans, supposedly meant for this purpose, are always conditioned on “structural adjustment” which simultaneously guarantees the perpetuation of the system of international dependency (and poverty) as it now exists. Structural adjustment demands that “superfluous government spending” be eliminated and that the national treasury ledger books show that there is as much money coming in as there is going out. This means that the kinds of unremunerated government spending like the CCC and the WPA which put Americans to work and money in their pockets in the 30’s, lifting the United States by its bootstraps out of the Great Depression, is now forbidden to the viiiWorld Bank, website introduction to internal panel discussion, “Overcon-sumption in a Globalizing World. Is it a disease? Can it be cured?” (Feb 27, 2002).

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Third World.ix The same applies to other examples of “government waste” like education and health care, in spite of the fact that they are known to be indispensable to development.

IMF policy, which is dominated by US interests, also insists that loans be accompanied by trade and finance market liberalization, i.e. “free trade reforms”, which means eliminating protectionist barriers. This is demanded in spite of the fact that by all assessments, tariffs and other protective measures are necessary for poor countries if they are to develop their industrial and commercial potential. Such was the case with our own economy in its developing phase. But now that it is “fully developed”, what the US wants is market access and that means other countries must lower their barriers -- even if it ruins their fledgling industries.x

This suggests that, secretly perhaps, they do recognize the dilemma after all, with selfish intent. For this policy makes development promises that in fact, cannot be kept. The conditions responsible for the inequities are maintained in place, and those that foster development are not.xi This has led some to think that the development industry is really in the business of knowingly creating false expectations and intentionally stalling. After many decades of professional development efforts, and untold billions of dollars in aid, the situation is worse than ever. The World Bank reports, “the average

ixCf. Stiglitz, op.cit, p.11f.xArthur Macewan, “The Gospel of Free Trade”, Dollars and Sense, July /Aug, 2002, p.10, the article was reprinted from Nov. 1991 issue of the same journal; and Stiglitz, op.cit. passim, but especially p.59ff. Stiglitz, moreover, (pp.60-61) criticizes the US for hypocritically maintaining protections for its own weaker industries, like Steel, even while demanding that other countries lower theirs. See also Stiglitz, “A Second Chance for Brazil and the IMF” New York Times, 8/14/2002xiStiglitz, op.cit. p.80 accuses the IMF not just of mistakes, but of something much more serious. He says: “It is important not only to look at what the IMF puts on its agenda, but what it leaves off. Stabilization is on the agenda; job creation is off. Taxation and its adverse affects are on the agenda; land re-form is off. There is money to bail out banks, but not to pay for improved edu-cation and health services, let alone to bail out workers who are thrown out of their jobs as a result of IMF’s macroeconomic mismanagement.”

Indeed, he accuses the IMF of having abandoned its mandate to maintain global economic stability and crassly assumed a role of promoting and protect-ing the narrow interests of the financial community, p.206ff.

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income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times that in the poorest 20 -- a ratio that has doubled in the past 40 years ...”xii This was completely predictable, given the indispensable function that Third World poverty performs for the First World.

“Development? In your dreams,” critics say, it’s a game of smoke and mirrors. A case in point. Under terms proposed by the developed nations for international ratification at the Rio and Kyoto conferences, super-wealthy and highly polluting industries, say like a First World Steel manufacturer, would be allowed to “buy” (with a large donation) hundreds of square miles of pristine forest in a developing nation. By agreement with the host country this land would be declared “off-limits” to logging or development, perhaps as a park or national forest. The plan, known as carbon squestration, claims to offset “for the planet” the pollution produced by the steel Corporation in its home locations. In effect, the industry will be given the right to continue to pour contaminants into the atmosphere as before in exchange for the oxygen production and CO2 absorption that comes from “íts” forest halfway around the globe.xiii But also notice: for this charade of environmental concern, woodland use would be curtailed only in the developing nation while no such restriction is imposed on First World forests, and certainly not on industry. Many observers say these schemes, promoted by prestigious First World “environmental” groups like the Nature Conservancy, prove that First World interest in Third World development is a sham.

USAID PolicyOfficial USAID development policy, (which also directs the focus

of the Peace Corps) as explained by a US Embassy official in the Dominican Republic in 1990, is another case in point. “We have a two-pronged strategy”, he told our small group of visitors.

The first was to generate “free trade zones” in developing countries. He explained that this program supplanted the discarded “import

xiiWorld Bank, World Development Report 2003, “Overview”, p.7xiiiNature Conservancy Magazine article (1997), reports on an actual transac-tion between Virginia based energy giant AES Corporation, “setting aside” what was private land in Paraguay, to offset emissions in their Hawaii generat-ing plant. Since the Rio and Kyoto protocols which contained these provisions were never signed by the US, the use of these “carbon sequestrations” to ex-empt AES from the State of Hawaii’s CO2 limits, never took place. A techni-cality.

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substitution” model for the now-in-vogue “export” model of development. This means that instead of helping poor countries expand their own manufacturing capacities and reduce their dependence on imported manufactured goods for internal consumption (simultaneously increasing employment), official US policy now is to get poor countries to continue to export whatever it is they grow or extract -- coffee, oranges, bananas, copper, oil -- and then create extra-territorial enclaves allowing for the entrance of “investment capital” for foreign manufacturing enterprises that make products for export. The benefit here, supposedly, is “jobs” for the host country.

These foreign factories are not under the restrictions of the local tax, labor and environmental laws. The “free trade zones” are like industrial parks. They are physically fenced off from the rest of the country and are guarded by government troops who are supposed to make sure they remain free of workplace safety inspectors and labor union activity as guaranteed by treaty. The plant facilities are leased from the host country, insuring that, in the case of “political instability”, the investing capitalists own nothing there they can lose. All the raw materials used by the factories are brought in from outside, preventing any dependence on (and possible development of) a local supply sector, and the manufactured product is shipped out to lucrative markets elsewhere, to the profit of the investing capitalists.

Some local people get “jobs”, and the host government, of course, gets a “cut”. But, far from being the development of big businesses capable of creating a trickle down effect by expanding buying power among the general population (the classic theory), the policy results in the target country continuing on as before, supplying raw materials and now labor to the First World. In spite of these “free trade zones”, unemployment in these countries remains astronomically high, and the wages are too low for “growth stimulant” spending, and so indigenous business expansion does not take place. This belies any claim that the purpose of these “free trade zones” is “real development”. The effect is rather to allow international capital access to one and only one thing from the host country, cheap labor, that and nothing else. This way of exploiting labor was pioneered in the border maquiladoras between the US & Mexico and later amplified by NAFTA and its progeny. It’s a model that actually prevents indigenous industrial and commercial development.

Cheap labor. How cheap, by the way? I was shocked to discover in Ciudad Juarez as late as 1998 that most factory workers are now

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earning almost as little as agricultural workers: around $5 a day. I don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see in this fact alone the maintenance of an unequal status quo. Here in Southwest Virginia everybody is aware that the textile factories that once sustained the working population of our area have moved “south of the border” precisely to take advantage of the cheaper labor. The unemployed, our neighbors and friends, can often tell you what country and city their escaped factories went to. But what they may not know is that it is often the result of USAID policy.

The “Technology of Under-development”Free Trade Zones are matched by the second side to US policy,

according to our embassy staffer, “micro-enterprise development”, in which low interest loans are made available to poor people to start or maintain “little businesses” of their own. These businesses are almost universally in what economists call the “informal sector”. That means food and beverage vending and other cottage industries for the local village market, arts and crafts, weavings, carvings, often for “export” to the “Pier 1 style” outlets who pay a pittance for what earns great profit for the store. These little businesses create a stable artisan class of self-employed poor, but do not have the power to provide the jobs needed to overcome widespread unemployment and support the national economy, if parity were really the goal. The “small business” program keeps individuals and their families from starving (and there-fore “stable”) but is not designed to achieve development. The entire effort is not capable of doing more than partially filling the massive un-and-under-employment vacuum created by the lack of any real national growth in the industrial and commercial sectors. Of course, along with this, no land re-distribution is contemplated. US policy in this instance clearly betrays its commitment to maintaining the inequitable status quo, in spite of any and all rhetoric to the contrary.

Micro-enterprise support cannot lead to development, but it does fall under the category of “sustainable”. This is the other horn of the dilemma we mentioned earlier. The “micro-enterprise” movement, like our Steel Corporation’s “pollution solution”, can present a deceptive facade. In this case, loans are made available for the kinds of enterprise that would clearly qualify as “sustainable” or based on “appropriate technology” by current standards. This is very appealing to many “progressive” First Worlders who are concerned about the environment. Context, of course, is all-important here as everywhere.

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In the context, therefore, of the actual parity aspirations of the Third World and the current model offered by developed nations, the micro-enterprise program is identified as exactly the kind of “appropriate technology” that the Third World accuses of being fundamentally repressive, a tool for continued dependence, what some have named the “technology of underdevelopment”. Appropriate technology requires an appropriate context. At the present time, no such context exists.

The Middle Class DreamThe development industry markets an item in high demand: the as-

piration of people everywhere to a middle class standard of living that has been the world model for over a century. What my grandfather re-alized in 1901 directed his energies. He took his family and left his home, language, culture and climate not only to escape poverty, but to buy into a hard new world, a world where he saw the future of human-ity. The vision of the middle class way of life, the American Dream, was his dream too. He gave up everything for it.

If I knew that this is what energized Santo and Francesca Eguale, virtually illiterate Third Worlders in 1901, it should not have come as a shock to me, then, that the same dream might motivate the Third Worlders of today. But, I too, was a “progressive” First Worlder in the 1980’s, and frankly I did not expect to find that same attitude in the policy makers of Sandinista Nicaragua. I worked there as a mechanics instructor in an agricultural training program in 1984. My earlier work in Chiapas had brought us to Nicaragua in 1983 where I was invited by a former religious colleague to help train peasant farmers to use and maintain farm equipment. The rejection of “appropriate technology” on the part of the agricultural officials was unequivocal and, I might add, quite visceral. They were the first people I heard call it the “tech-nology of underdevelopment”. To the proposal that the campesino should be provided and trained to use an “improved ox-plow”, they answered, “you do it first; then we'll think about it.” Their retort exposed a glaring inconsistency in the “appropriate technology” proposals coming from the First World. Everyone knew the American farmer would never abandon his tractor for a “more efficient use of oxen”. Nicaraguans weren’t any different.

During this same time, my wife worked with Swiss and Chilean organizers to mount a program of technical upgrade and training for the volunteer mid-wives who have worked since time immemorial in the rural countryside. That project, like the “better plow” suggestion, faced

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similar opposition from health officials. The program was accepted only reluctantly and clearly labeled “stop-gap” because, and only because the resources for full-scale hi-tech hospitals with trained professionals, including the usual male obstetricians, were not available. But to the extent that hi-tech medical facilities ever became available, all “para-professional”, “peasant health-promoter”, “barefoot doctor” models would be abandoned with short shrift. The argument was ever the same. “You do it first.”

They said they were not going to let themselves be tricked by the hypocrisy of the rich nations. They saw “appropriate technology” as a First World ploy to maintain the Third World as it was, supplying cheap raw materials and now cheap labor to international capital, but forever marginated from what everyone knew was “real development”. “Real development” was what we have in the First World, and real life is the way we live. “Appropriate Technology” would insure that it would never be theirs. Uh-uh, they said. No way ... José.

The argument is telling. Pessimists adduce it as proof that the planet is going to hell in a handbasket. For, they say, not only will the First World refuse to respond to the challenge, but the self-subsistence we might have thought we found in the Third World as a possible model for the future, was a mirage; it has no credibility; it has no defenders and the way of life itself is fast disappearing. So there is no viable model except the First World formula of superfluous consumption, unlimited growth tooled by runaway technology predicated on the illusion of unlimited tellurian resources. The formula for disaster. What doubles the trouble is that in spite of the perennial rhetoric, it still remains an inaccessible goal for the Third World, and therefore, far from bringing at least a concessionary peace, it is always a potential source of explosive frustration against the First World which appears to be maintaining the inequity intentionally. This still remains one of the unmentionable factors underlying 9-11. Officialdom does not want to talk about it. Of course not. Think what it would mean if they did.

Some, citing our customary standard of living, fear that people will resist adjustments to the current situation. Others, however, callously determined to prevent any reduction in First World privileges no matter what the cost, prefer to live with a volatile injustice. I accuse those who insist on retaining such inequity, of silently being prepared to plunge the global community into an endless future of institutionalized conflict -- Third World resentment resisted by First World military “se-

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curity” measures. I saw mansions of the ultra-rich in latinamerica sur-rounded by walls of razor wire and hired guards. But those that erected such fortifications also had to live behind them. This is another “solu-tion” I’m not willing to accept.

The Poverty of the Rich“You do it first.” I believe this is a legitimate challenge. If we

disregard the sarcasm, it means if things are to change, it has to begin with us. And if we truly believe that appropriate technology is good for people and good for the planet, then it should be good for us as well. In this particular case, it might mean precisely trading in the tractor for oxen or horses. That would superficially appear as a “step backwards” for us. And if we accepted it, it would mean a voluntary impoverishment for the First World. The same is true in every area of production and service, not to mention consumption. Please observe, like a Calculus of Denial, as we reach for the infinity of truth, comprehension approaches zero. This derivative is officially unthinkable.3

Voluntary poverty. You can’t talk about this. “Face reality,” they tell me. I’ve been advised not even to use the term. Better to say “simplicity of life” so as to avoid offending those who have money and intend to spend it. Hey, I can live with that; I have some money I intend to spend. What are we talking about anyway, the destitution and punishment of another group of people? ... making more people fearful and insecure? Not at all. We are talking about a serious change in lifestyle and aspirations, before it’s too late. It’s a change that will mean such a significant modification in our habits that it will achieve a significant reduction in what we consume. I am arguing for the recognition of the unacceptable inequities and senseless plunder that define how we have chosen to live in our fragile world. And I am suggesting the conscientious assumption of personal responsibility to address them.

Nothing could be more normal. Voluntary poverty, in a real sense, represents an attitude of “delayed gratification” and “social adjustment”. When we use this terminology, the images shift to familiar categories of personal maturity and cooperation. Or, imagine a group of siblings in a family. It’s not an extraordinary matter that the parents would require resources be shared among everybody, even if it meant a sacrifice for some.

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I want to point out immediately, however, this common allegory illustrates an attitude, it is not meant as a corrective model. The planetary community is not made up of children with benevolent parents. Voluntary poverty corresponds to an attitude. Voluntary poverty represents the individual’s personal recognition of the inequities and unsustainability of the world situation. Voluntary poverty represents the decision to “begin with us.” And, if it helps, let’s call it “simplicity of life”. We’re not children; we don’t have to be told what to do. Many people, responding to their native common sense about the global situation, have been practicing voluntary poverty for years.

We’ve mentioned the environment. Do we really need to elaborate on it? How many more statistics can we absorb about the fatally de-structive exploitation of the earth’s resources. There is no dispute that this effect is in full swing and it is directly caused by superfluous con-sumption, unlimited growth, runaway technology. Just think: if even one of these complex systems that we depend on for life as we know it should suddenly shut down or go irreversibly ballistic, all current “fixed” terms of reference will evaporate overnight, and what was once unthinkable will become a daily obsession. “Reality” has its limita-tions.

And when we mention these causes we realize that they point di-rectly to us, the First World. We are the ones responsible. Let one, al-most incredible statistic, suffice for this. This comes from Rashmi Mayur, environmental consultant to the UN, at a talk given at Radford University in Virginia, January, 2002. He said that in the present world situation, when an American baby is born, it is estimated that she will use, in the course of her lifetime, 67 times more of the world’s re-sources -- in food, fuel, medicine, clothing, housing, education, etc., etc. -- than her sister born the same day in Bangladesh. A European baby will use 34 times more.

The whole human race may drag these chains, but it is the First World that forged them.

Country PeopleIn the battle for the conservation of the earth, we of the urban mid-

dle class always thought we had the country people to count on. We were sure there would always be rural peasants, farmers whom we could trust to preserve our bedrock values, our ancient traditions, our cherished manual skills. There would always be someone to grow

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food, to milk cows, to slaughter a hog, to remember how to clog and fiddle. We also knew the earth was fundamentally safe because it was in the hands of those who cared for it and lived on a minimum of its re-sources. We could blithely go on our way pursuing endeavors of dubi-ous value, extracting more from the earth to maintain ourselves in our self-absorbed leisure pursuits than any previous generation. But now everything has changed.

Now when Virgil and Horace leave “The City”, decadent Rome, to go out to their rural retreats, they can’t count on a vast population of country folk maintaining alive a way of life that will re-create and re -fresh them. They go to the country now and they find ... themselves -- calculating entrepreneurs, urbanized businessmen in custom suburban homes, whose “country” credentials entitle them to trade in bucolic tourism: imitation crafts, factory made apple butter, assembly-line rocking chairs -- the stereotyped images of what no longer exists, and what soon no one will remember how to make. The rural countryside is fast becoming homogeneous whole-cloth with the rest of our subur-ban shopping-mall culture. One perceptive observer has called it the “ruburbs”.

We are accustomed to this in our own rural areas where now only 15% of the American population live. Our countryside was depopu-lated of farmers decades ago. The “family farms” that survive today are able to do so because they operate on an economy of scale that is indistinguishable from agribusiness. A grower and his children may all share the same last name, but if they function as a corporate entity at a high level of capital investment, payroll, mechanization, infrastructure, crop acreage and volume of production, then we’d have to say they were a large food-business enterprise that happened to be run by mem-bers of the same family. That’s hardly a “family farm”. The poorer families that still inhabit the mountains where we have our farm, all work “out”, meaning they have jobs elsewhere. They may have a little land, but they do not farm it for survival. Whatever “farming” they might do is in the nature of a week-end hobby: a house garden, less of-ten a hog or chickens for the family, perhaps in rare instances a beef cow to sell. The “family farm” is no more.

According to US Census figures, in the year 1900, as my grandfa-ther prepared to bring his family to America, the situation was differ-ent. At that time, our rural county here in Southwest Virginia sup-ported more population than it has at any time since, including today.xiv

Most of those people lived on small farms, each family with their 15 or

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20 acres where they grew vegetables, fruit, had animals for meat and milk, work and transportation and in general made or found in the wild everything they needed, from tools to clothing to medicine. The dense forests that surround our own land have grown over but cannot hide the myriad of roads that -- not so long ago -- criss-crossed these hills serv-ing farmsteads whose numbers we can only guess at. Those in our re-gion that farm “successfully” now, must cultivate many more times the amount of land that supported their ancestors. And they can participate in the modern economy because they produce “one thing which they sell, and they buy everything else.” In our own particular case, we too have found ourselves nudged inexorably in this direction. Every year we relinquish more self-subsistence tasks in order to dedicate ourselves with increasing exclusivity to the demands of making and selling wine. After all, I tell myself, this is America.

But I did not expect to find what I’ve come to think of as an Ameri-can phenomenon among the peasant populations of the Third World. Perhaps I believed that they were too poor and destitute even to imag-ine life on any other basis. But it’s been carefully explained to them, that they are poor and the rich are rich, among other things, because the rich “sell one thing, and buy everything else.” The massive urbaniza-tion occurring in Latin America -- the abandonment of peasant rural living and the move to squalid urban slums -- is not only due to land-lessness and poverty; it is also due to the middle class dream. They are learning to forget their varieties of interaction with “mother-earth” -- their skills for growing, crafting, building, hunting, healing, surviving in all its forms -- that we of the educated classes always found so quaint and reassuring, even while we rejected those pursuits as unworthy of our own precious time and effort, and did nothing to insure that those that did them were able to live humanly by them. They are learning to desire the very things that we have always told them, by our lives if not by our words, were really important. We’ve enjoyed and appreciated their adulation and their deference toward us, their “superiors”. Why are we now surprised that they want to be like us, to want what we want, and to have what we have?

For the peasant this naturally includes the attraction of civilized “leisure” -- the upper class model of life free of manual labor because historically work was done for them by slaves -- the ultimate symbol of xivHistoric Census Counts for Virginia Counties and Cities. Source: Census of Population, 1790-1990. Prepared by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. (This is accessible on-line).

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“real humanity”. “Work” then translates to “hustle”, the labor ex-pended in avoiding work, or getting other people to work for you. The peasant poor do not want “appropriate technology”; they already have that. What they want is the “American Dream”.

The Dream. People’s motivation while universally economic, is also -- shall we say -- always “spiritual”, always a function of a “dream”, a “vision”. We have to be careful about our dreams. What we dream is what we become. We are, after all, human beings. It’s what we do.

So we’re back to our dilemma. If the developed nations accede to this universal aspiration, and not only continue with our own outra-geous patterns of consumption but also encourage and assist everyone in achieving the same, we will quickly outstrip the ability of the earth to support us. If on the other hand, we attempt to convince the peasant poor that we, First Worlders, somehow deserve to consume at these levels, and they don’t, we will create a resentment of such towering proportions that it will explode against us -- again and again -- in fury.

This has to change. And it has to begin with us.

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III. Solutions? Beware the furor sanandi

he usual argument against taking any steps in the direction of voluntary poverty is that they are doomed to failure; they will not be effective. I agree to this extent: voluntary poverty will

be effective in achieving equity and sustainability only cumulatively and in context -- in other words, only as the people of the First World begin to embrace it in great numbers and our economic system is transformed. Otherwise it will remain symbolic.

TThe objection, correctly aimed, would apply to the following typical

scenario: there is a group of conscience-stricken First Worlders, say an American church community, that feel they must do something. They collect a hefty percentage of their income and dedicate it directly to a community in the Third World, with the intention of literally and concretely eliminating the inequities that exist between them, in at least this particular case. Such international almsgiving has been the inspiration behind the sister-city and sister-parish relationships that have proliferated in recent years. These contributions often involve considerable self-denial. We can call it a voluntary poverty. One can only admire the generosity and thirst for justice that these efforts display.

But, even on the chance that enough people decided to participate in such an undertaking to make it a significant amount of money, any practical attempt to create a concrete project of this type will have a difficult time accomplishing its goal. The sudden and massive influx of bucks into this Third World community will tend to spawn a series of adverse effects. First, the poor locality in question will become immediately separated and inevitably alienated from its neighboring communities who are not the beneficiaries of such largesse. Second, a relationship of financial dependence will be created that elicits an obsequious attachment in the recipients. They become beggars and hustlers, and are forced to think of their most basic rights as the gifts of the rich. Third, the local population receiving assistance will be drawn away from finding their own local solutions with their neighbors and within the context of the resources of their proper national and regional entities. And, of course, there is the ever-present danger of corruption and embezzlement.

It’s instructive that these problems are the same as those encountered (created) by current NGO funders and project organizers

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from the First World. And it’s no wonder; both types of effort are based on the same self-contradictory premises. They assume “development” can occur outside of the context of the macro-structures -- economic systems, governments, patterns of consumption -- that rule the world in which the local community dwells. By abstracting from “context”, they isolate people in “target” communities and divide them from their neighbors; they preclude regional and national solutions that are durable and sustainable. They generate profound loyalties on the part of locals to the donating agency and its organizers, to the detriment of solidarity that belongs to the neighboring communities of poor people. Sister-City projects don’t work, for the same reason that projects funded by NGOs don’t work. It’s not a question of money. Neither is committed to finding durable, lasting, sustainable solutions that are locally driven and national and regional in scope. Consider. What is the lasting benefit of building a school, and filling it with equipment, even with local labor and community participation, if the beneficiary community is incapable of repeating such an accomplishment on its own, when and where it wants to, marshaling the resources found locally and nationally in a paced process that includes their neighbors? What is the benefit of gifts given to one locality if it generates resentment, jealously, and competitive non-cooperation in nearby communities? It would seem axiomatic that change cannot take place in isolation. Poverty is a product of our system; and no “development” project, from an NGO or a “Sister-City”, is prepared to take on the system.

What’s most destructive in my view, is the local poor communities themselves, the “beneficiaries” of First World alms, will have their energies detoured and drained off, hustling and begging for international grants instead of demanding and changing their own national government’s policies and priorities, competing with their neighbors instead of organizing with them, and following an IMF model of “development” that necessarily includes the outrageous lifestyle of the well paid First World organizers that move among them. This “bad example” is not just conjecture. I personally know Third Worlders inspired by the “development workers” they’ve met in their country, who would like to abandon their homes and countries in despair of ever achieving “the dream” where they live, and emigrate to the US. Perhaps if they saw us living a different dream, they might reconsider where they should pour out their life’s energies and make their contribution to the future of humanity.

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But please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying almsgiving should be forbidden, “Thou shalt not give!” I am attempting to clarify a perspective in principle: Almsgiving is not the solution to Third World poverty; it can be damaging in any number of ways. Once people know that giving alms is a potential trap and detour, most often harmful, and always partial and stop-gap, perhaps then they can cautiously participate in selective philanthropies carefully chosen for their aptness for integration into the larger context of global economic transformation. Donors and program designers may perhaps avoid creating destructive dependencies and selfish isolation at the local level when they give their alms; and they may themselves avoid the kind of offensive lifestyle that contradicts everything they claim to stand for, as they give their alms. And, not least, they may save themselves and their clients from the hopelessness that results from the failures of great expectations, isolated from context.

Where am I going with all this? The point is that the most appropriate response from the First World is not rich people giving money to poor people. The value of voluntary poverty does not lie in its connection with almsgiving. It’s not our generosity that’s called for, it’s our self-denial. The “zeal to heal”, the attempt to be effective -- out of context -- may only intensify the problem. My perspective says the rich should become poor, not the poor rich. It symbolizes a serious reduction in our consumption habits. Almsgiving may be a response to what we need, not necessarily what the poor need. Voluntary poverty declares that we in the First World have to change ourselves, not the poor -- that the problem is not with them, it’s with us. And the solution, contrariwise, is not to be found in our way of living but theirs; we have to begin to live like they do.

If we want a sustainable, equitable world, it has to begin with us.

A Symbol that WorksJesus is reported to have said, “the poor you will always have with

you”.xv That was perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, for the re-mark has been taken as if it were some sort of dogma, defining poverty as a permanent feature of human society. But, when read in context, it means no such thing. It was in fact part of a dialog criticizing imper-sonal, self-righteous almsgiving as an improper substitute for the deeper responses demanded by the human condition, in the specific in-

xvJn 12

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stance of Jesus’ comment, mourning for a dying friend. His statement was not really about poverty at all, but about being fully human.

In worlds smaller than ours, like the one Jesus lived in, alms may very well have eliminated poverty; and so it was assumed as a serious (and therefore perhaps, perfunctory) responsibility. But in our times poverty is a different phenomenon. Its enormity and complexity elude our customary ministrations. Alms don’t work anymore. The self-de-nial, the voluntary poverty associated with almsgiving, in the context of our global system, is not going to be effective in achieving definitive justice the way it might have been in the time of Jesus or even four hundred years ago in a nation of peasant village communities.

When John Wesley, the apostle of Methodism, proposed voluntary poverty as an essential expression of the community of faith, he could also reasonably expect that, if coupled with almsgiving and practiced faithfully, it might actually re-distribute wealth and serve as an effec-tive means of achieving social justice throughout England and perhaps the world. The world was much smaller and simpler then. But, one of the great shortcomings of the counsel of religious poverty as we have inherited it, is that our global economy has created a structural imbal-ance of such depth and magnitude that it has rendered almsgiving prac-tically impotent.

So then, what will work? Will the poor always be with us?I offer a sketch. In spite of my fondest hopes, I fully suspect that

the world is not going to return en masse to self-subsistence farming, which nevertheless, I claim still serves as the classic paradigm of sus-tainable living. Other pre-and-preter-industrial modes of commerce and production can also provide illuminating examples as we search for concrete models for a future that really works. But, in all cases, a fully effective solution to our problems will require a universal “structural adjustment” technically applied to the entire global economic system. We cannot trust “spontaneous market forces” to do this for us. It’s not going to happen without planning and decision. This is very important. While the details may well be beyond my competent reach in these re-flections, I believe some broad brush-strokes of a new paradigm can be confidently painted.

I believe that hoped-for reforms, planetary in scope and revolution-ary in effect, must be such as to 1) reduce consumption significantly and unequivocally, and that is primarily targeted to the First World, 2) eliminate superfluous technology entirely, and 3) install a system of

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overall economic patterns -- from drawing board to market -- based on stasis, balance and immobility rather than on unlimited growth and ex-pansion. Macro-structures with these characteristics may very well provide the appropriate context for enterprises based on an appropriate technology that is universally applied to both the developed and the de-veloping worlds. Without them, however, appropriate technology tar-geted to the Third World alone, even if exquisitely designed and poten-tially sustaining in the present context, will be taken by them as their consignment to inferiority, dependence and poverty. And they will not accept it. We have to understand this.

But at the same time, the real solution, which is an epic task of global economic transformation, with all the intense political labor that that implies, will itself be rightly discredited if it is not accompanied by the proper attitude: the sincere willingness of committed First Worlders to make the adjustments in our own personal lives needed for any ade-quate future plan to succeed. For the ultimate solution will necessarily entail First World impoverishment. I suggest voluntary poverty as a sign of our sincerity, because it’s a sign that works. Voluntary poverty will cumulatively accomplish economic transformation and environ-mental sustainability. In the meantime, it remains the “spiritual” atti-tude and personal discipline that accompanies, inspires, and anticipates it. It projects the vision of a future that works.

Today, voluntary poverty’s “function”, if we need to use that term, is symbolic. But it’s a creative symbol that does more than just stand for what it signifies. Voluntary poverty actually embodies, literally and objectively, the reduction of consumption that global equity demands. As the numbers who embrace it accumulate, it will become increas-ingly effective. But without it, any attempt at promoting equity -- even the best -- risks being viewed as hypocritical and self-serving, and un-dermines its intent. This symbol is not an arbitrary signification, a de-vice for conventional communication like a bumper sticker or tee-shirt with a statement. Voluntary poverty makes its point, yes indeed, but it makes it by being exactly what it communicates -- a commitment to re-duced consumption and a purposely chosen restriction to no-frill tech-nology and zero-growth in all the endeavors under our control. And to the extent that great numbers participate, as it approaches a “critical mass”, it will become infallibly effective. In the meantime, it remains a symbol that anticipates and in a real sense makes a down payment on the future adjustments that a global reformation of the economic system

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must eventually demand if the world is to achieve its twin goals of en-vironmental sustainability and equity among people.

As a symbol, it also accurately reflects the needed shift in attitude for well-meaning First Worlders from “helping others” to reforming ourselves and challenging the attitudes that lie at the base of our blindly selfish over-consumption. I believe “helping others” -- often with su-perfluous resources that leave our consumption habits intact -- can be a self-deceiving exercise that dodges the real issue and may serve as an excuse to maintain the status quo.

Voluntary poverty may be a creative symbol but, it bears repeating, at the present time it is still only a symbol. Voluntary poverty by itself or with almsgiving is not the solution. We can no longer uncritically accept those religious programs that have suggested that it was. We have to see that the solution in fact demands a systemic economic trans-formation that is global and structurally radical, and which can be ex-pected to require an unaccustomed impoverishment for the First World, an impoverishment which voluntary poverty anticipates; and until that is embraced, there is no other. Whether by religion or politics, we who are committed to effective change need to avoid having our focus blurred and our energies diverted into Band-Aid responses -- or fan-tasies of denial, like “sustainable growth” -- that do not and cannot solve the problem. And we must maintain our commitment to solving the problem, effectively and definitively, or we have betrayed the poor -- and the earth.

LifestyleIn the final analysis, these reflections are about lifestyle.Some people have such a profound sense of our common humanity

that, no matter what their lifestyle, their solidarity and compassion for others would always override all else. These remarkable people are all around us. They are the salt of the earth.

But there are others, more like myself perhaps, for whom lifestyle is not irrelevant to the achievement of our potential depth as human be-ings. Quite the contrary, we seriously depend on it to help us maintain our human spirit, our social focus. This need for structure is the same reason we join political parties and churches. Lifestyle is the transla-tion into real time of our highest values. In turn it becomes their guar-antor, concretizing, institutionalizing, and perpetuating them. My sense is that there are many of us who need structure of this kind. We are less profound, less undistractedly human than those other great ones;

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and without a lifestyle to support us in our fragile humanity -- our sense of family with the whole world -- we are quite capable of drifting into the gluttonous venality and self-centered individualism that character-izes our First World consumer culture, the shopping-mall lifestyle that actually dominates our society. From the experience of my own weak-ness I feel compelled to cry out a warning: We will inevitably be con-formed to the lifestyle in which we live unless we intentionally substi-tute another.

I have tried to say that Poverty, instead of being something to fear and avoid, might very well represent an inchoate solution to our poten-tially fatal problems as a species on our planet home. Instead of run-ning from it, I’m suggesting we pursue it, embrace it and cherish it, as a companion, a Sister.

There’s nothing to be afraid of. For, after all, there is nothing new here; we humans are already radically poor, by nature, by destiny. The deep compassion that binds our perishing humanity to mutual support is based on our endemic neediness as a species. Voluntary poverty, be-sides its other functions, can serve to recall that one inescapable reality about ourselves that is the source of all equanimity, all equality, all compassion, all forgiveness and all peace among people. Our mortality -- our common poverty.

Tony EqualeWillis, Virginia,October, 2002

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ENDNOTES

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