Income Poverty and Sustainability
I want to talk about a bug-bear. How exclusive sustainability is…
The Climate Crisis and sustainability caters to people like me: white and middle class. But I didn’t grow up middle class, and the messaging and drive for people to buy better is infuriating to my childhood self. Of course, I’d like to buy nice, local, nourishing food, but my family budget was more like turkey dinosaurs from a bargain supermarket.
I can see how middle-class people think it’s just a personal choice, a choice of better budgeting and voting with your pound. I sometimes find myself thinking the same until I remember my childhood. The reality is that sometimes you’re so cash strapped you have to use the £10 your child got in birthday money to top up the empty electricity card. Buying local organic chicken for an extra £3 is not a minor inconvenience for the greater good, it’s a big decision that has a real and immediate personal impact.
Maybe you’ve seen low-income people with an iPhone and thought, well, they’ve clearly made a choice on where to spend their money. An easy conclusion to come to, but not necessarily true or fair. If I may digress for a moment into a philosophical concept - do we have free will? Your decisions can only ever be informed by your experience and knowledge that you have right now, which is a by-product of your environment. The ‘bad habits' of the poor have been created by a system, not by individual choice. Yes, an individual can choose to break free, but have you ever tried giving up a bad habit? It’s hard. And harder when you don’t have the network and tools to facilitate it.
The thing is, you can access debt easily for things that are bad for you and bad for the planet. You can pay in instalments for an iPhone but not your weekly shop of healthy, sustainable food. Bad debt can be a product of a bad habit, but those that profit from debt encourage it, like any other product with a strong marketing department. You might like to think you’re immune to corporate persuasion then you find yourself craving a cold coca-cola on a hot day suspiciously soon after going past a billboard with a coke advert.
When you live in income poverty, that often brings with it a suite of problems, caring about electric car capacity and clean air zones is difficult, even maddening, since ‘I’ still have to get the bus that’s always late, slow, noisy and often dirty to my minimum wage job. Is it really a surprise that people who are struggling want a more comfortable life, more than they want net-zero before 2050? Even if you do care, sustainability is inaccessible for many and it is disenfranchising to say that if you are poor you are excused from participating, excluded from the voting with your money narrative. The barriers to living sustainably while on a low income are manifold and complex.
So what can we do about it? I don’t think it’s necessarily a question of ‘educating’ people, I think it’s a question of showing that the climate crisis cares about people, not just those suffering acutely at the very bottom of the global league tables but the quality of life and struggles of the strangers down the road. I would like to see more sustainability conversations incorporate this, and more ways that people can get involved without having to spend money they don’t have.
Fundamentally I think the climate crisis needs to talk more about human experience and suffering, needs to make the issues relevant and accessible for everyone. We need a more human world, and it's not instead of a more sustainable world, it's ultimately the same problem - prioritising non-monetary aspects of life.
