Redefining Wealth and Poverty with an Older Language

Wealth and poverty are terms that we should redefine to be seen in terms of the richness of the relationship to the organisms of a land base. This is the only truly sustainable way to define wealth and poverty. Real wealth is only developed through a sense of responsibility to communicate with nature, and to understand its universal language.

People should shed their cultural shells and re-acknowledge that this universal language exists, then attempt to understand it and speak it. Once one observes this language being used and begin to acknowledge its existence apart from the culture of domination, one will feel the immense weight of the universe on one's shoulders. The knowledge will follow that this is the most important idea that humans can ever know. It is something indigenous people have known for thousands of years. They have had this knowledge, and at the same time have seen the surge of industrial civilization.

As humans, our written and spoken languages and religions are not universal. They are our cultural inventions and are not understood by all creatures. They preoccupy us with a focus on an inability to communicate with other organisms, including other humans, when we use these tools. We should focus on reconnecting with indigenous organisms by acknowledging and speaking the universal language of nature, something we all have the capacity to understand and speak. The longer we devalue indigenous knowledge systems, the more difficult it will be to collectively rebuild this dialogue.

Although poverty is a complex issue when analyzed using the lens of industrial civilization, it develops when people collectively attempt to discard a dialogue or a symbiotic relationship with other organisms. This can happen despite of the fact that so many other organisms are attempting to have a relationship with humans. In our written and spoken languages, the idea of wealth or poverty stems from the domination of living things with quiet voices. It is expressed in monetary terms, a language nature does not understand. Exploitation by dominator culture (a term coined by Riane Eisler) and the associated use of its language has suppressed the dialogue with nature that undoubtedly propelled humans to be the most capably adaptive organism the earth has ever known. It is the reason for the spectrum of variation we see across the people of the world, and we are foolish to think we are exempt from it.