Fuente
The environment is the Earth, the Universe, and not simply what surrounds us, because what surrounds us is on a level of organization called the ecosystem. The ecosystem and the environment have natural factors that interact with each other, man is a natural factor, that is, he is a component of the ecosystem and therefore of the larger whole, the environment.
Poverty is the result of people's systematized exclusion. The ancestral knowledge of how to relate to the environment has been hidden from us, the natural factors capitalized on. We can hardly relate to nature and if we do, it is a crime because those natural factors have a price or an owner.
So: Is poverty predatory of the environment?
The environment is the Earth, the Universe, and not simply what surrounds us, because what surrounds us is on a level of organization called the ecosystem. The ecosystem and the environment have natural factors that interact with each other, man is a natural factor, that is, he is a component of the ecosystem and therefore of the larger whole, the environment.
The man in his level of development called society (it is a truth the agreement of the men accepted by the society, although it does not coincide with the reality), changed the name to the natural factors different from him and put price and utility to him. That is why society calls natural factors natural resources, they put a price on them and they plan to use them or are using them to generate money, wealth. Even man or a sector of society applies the property and we had already said that man is a natural factor of the environment, the ecosystem.
Property is a truth, an agreement between men, (*"how to own the river, the sky..." said the Indian who was stripped of his territory in the United States). When we are the owners of a natural factor or a group of them, of an ecosystem, because we own the agreement between men through the constitutions, laws, decrees, ordinances and other legal instruments, it is our truth. The reality is that we are not owners of anything, we are part of everything. We were saying that a group of people, a sector of society, concentrate the ownership of the ecosystems of the planet, some claim to be owners of the environment (environment is the whole planet, the whole universe and not simply what surrounds us).
In that rentier vision of natural factors (that's why they call them natural resources), because the environment has an owner and is an elite, the rest of us are invaders of its dominant properties or we don't have significant domains that irritate its tranquility. It can be said in those same terms that poverty is the exclusion of ecosystems. The poor do not have access to the legitimate real fact (reality) of being able to live in interaction with existing natural factors because of a formality, a truth called legal regulation within a capitalist socioeconomic philosophy that attributes property to people who have an instrument called money and capital.
In this environmental capitalism, in this system of ownership of ecosystems or their components, anyone who approaches the enterprise of interacting with natural factors without authorization is a predator. It is messing with someone's ecosystem or a group's ecosystem. We are not justifying the inappropriateness of the interrelationship of people who desperately seek their space and provisions, we know that the evolution of society marginalized the bulk of humanity of the ancestral knowledge of how to have a quality interrelationship very respectful of other environmental factors.
That is why for some years we have heard with horror that poverty is an environmental predator, perhaps it was said by some owner of the world's ecosystems and repeated and repeated and repeated. They almost make us environmentalists and ecologists tell that truth (the agreement of men assumed by society), to say that the poor were depredating natural resources (that is to say, telling natural factors that they have a price and have an owner).
In 1992 they met in Rio de Janeiro, in this Brazilian city was the Earth Summit (the UN through its environmental program the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP). At this meeting, a value judgment was made about the activities of society and their interrelationship with natural factors (the components of the environment). It was noted in the debate that the trend was the destruction of the environment (it is the Earth and the whole universe and not simply what surrounds us) and that from that moment on there should be a balance (sustainable development) between development and the environment, with the responsible participation and guarantee of the three sectors of society: governments and the parties that hold it on the one hand, the owners of the means of production and their companies on the other and completing it with the communities and all the people who make it up. It was also established that a strategy had to be established to diminish inequity and the lack of access to natural resources (natural factors with price or owners) and to society.
In short, society accepted from South America that things were being done wrong. They took it ten years later to evaluate from Africa and it was still done badly, and it had not improved. They said from Johannesburg that poverty exists and that it was still marginalized from its interrelationship with natural factors and with the instruments of society. As it turns out, health is the complete bio-psycho-social and environmental well-being and not the simple absence of disease, and they tell us that 80% of the world's people are poor, deprived of ecosystem factors, of the environment, because 80% of the world's people are sick. These environmental sick people (according to the definition), look for their life opportunity trying to interrelate with the environmental factors, without enough education in many cases (we already said that the ancestral knowledge of the good interrelation with the natural factors has been alienated), but they are obtained in private property.
This turns those who do not have access to their own ecosystems into criminals, into predators, they vociferate it on the radio spectrum, in the role of the newspaper and it remains as a sentence, as a truth, an agreement imposed by the owners of power (political, economic and communications) being assumed by the rest of society that poverty is predatory. It is to be debated..