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Is This Debate Relevant to Low-Income People?

Conference participants recognized the need to help and encourage people in the developing world to achieve material gain along a sustainable path. Discussions at this conference dwelt, however, on America's equity conundrum. How can one reconcile the excessive material consumption in America with the parallel fact that millions of poor and low-income people in America experience great poverty and suffering?

Conference participants addressed some of these issues in the larger group and in small group discussions. Despite the complexities and contradictions of asking people with relatively little to make do with less, a broad-based constituency is essential in building strategic coalitions. Effective strategies will require participation of many people, including Americans who are poor and laborers barely surviving financially. These people must help form strategies, shaping the debate and guiding future steps. Their exclusion would intensify already extreme social and economic inequalities and a growing polarization between those who have more than enough and those who have too little. Some fundamental concerns for future discussion include:

• How to make the issue of sustainable consumption pertinent to people with vastly different lifestyles and communities, as well as to people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, income levels, and races.
• The need for a shift in tax structure. The present system penalizes work and income and does little to reward saving. It should discourage consumption and resource use, but it must be progressive, not regressive.
• Ways to redistribute resources more equitably.
• Ways to strengthen the connections between environmental concerns and social and economic problems.
• The need to focus on building livable and sustainable cities and communities. This involves dealing with issues of crime and social injustice, economic deprivation, and quality of life.

Vernice Miller of the Natural Resources Defense Council pointed out that conference organizers must include thinkers, academicians, scientists and researchers of color, noting that their participation would change and illuminate the discussions. "Our lives [those of whites and people of color] are so fundamentally different that it's almost as if we live on two planets," Miller told those gathered. "We could talk about the same issues and have entirely different interpretations. Consumption and sustainable development are such issues....We all want to get to the same place, and we have got to start speaking to each other."