Blog Action Day - On Poverty

Poverty. This is certainly an appropriate time to be discussing poverty, when the economy is in a shambles and people are worried that their life savings are evaporating into thin air. Some are wondering how to make ends meet and whether they will hold on to their home as foreclosures continue to rise. Still others are facing reality and realizing retirement may not be feasible as soon as they had hoped...if ever. Some are losing their jobs.

But even these situations, unfortunate though they are, are not necessarily official poverty. The government currently defines poverty based on various annual income levels, depending on the size of the household. For instance, for an average 4-person household, the poverty threshold is $21,203 annually. There are also poverty guidelines, which are similar to the thresholds and are used to determine eligibility for various programs. These guidelines have higher thresholds for those living in Alaska and Hawaii, where living expenses are higher.

Unfortunately, although legislation was proposed back in 1994 to account for differences between the cost of living in the various states, it apparently never passed, as the poverty line is still the same throughout the contiguous United States. As someone who lives in the metropolitan New York area, I find the idea of any family of four surviving on only $21,200 a year hard to imagine.

According to Robert E. Rector, published on the website of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, although about 37 million people were officially under the poverty line in 2005, a large number of these people apparently live in relative comfort compared to what we ordinarily think of as poverty.

"The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various gov­ernment reports:

Forty-three percent of all poor households actu­ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6 percent of poor households are over­crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

...While the poor are generally well nourished, some poor families do experience temporary food shortages. But even this condition is relatively rare; 89 percent of the poor report their families have 'enough' food to eat, while only 2 percent say they 'often' do not have enough to eat."

However, the full analysis does indicate difficulties in making ends meet among those designated as poor, and Rector includes the following paragraph in his conclusions:

"But the living conditions of the average poor per­son should not be taken to mean that all poor Amer­icans live without hardship. There is a wide range of living conditions among the poor. Roughly a third of poor households do face material hardships such as overcrowding, intermittent food shortages, or difficulty obtaining medical care. However, even these households would be judged to have high liv­ing standards in comparison to most other people in the world."

To me the takeaway from this particular discussion of poverty is that a) conservatives don't like to admit that there is real poverty in this country, and b) generally, people in the United States are still a lot better off than, say, people in parts of Africa or other countries where real famine stalks the land and people truly have nothing.

That said, there are more subtle effects of poverty in the United States that, while not as devastating as actual starvation and complete penury, are nevertheless deeply harmful.

This site summarizes the consequences of poverty as follows:

"More than any other social class, the poor suffer from short life expectancies and health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and mental illness. Reasons include the following:

Poor people are often not well educated about diet and exercise. They are more likely than people in higher social strata to be overweight and suffer from nutritional deficits.

They are less likely to have health insurance, so they put off going to the doctor until a problem seems like a matter of life and death. At that time they must find a public health facility that accepts patients with little or no insurance.

Living in poverty brings chronic stress. Poor people live every day with the uncertainty of whether they can afford to eat, pay the electric bill, or make the rent payment. Members of the middle class also have stress but have more options for addressing it.

Poor people usually do not have jobs that offer them vacation time to let them relax.

High levels of unresolved stress, financial problems, and poor health can wreak havoc within a relationship. Poor people report more relationship problems than do people in other classes and have higher rates of divorce and desertion. The children of such families are more likely than their middle-class counterparts to grow up in broken homes or in single-parent, female-headed households.

...Anthropologist Oscar Lewis coined the term 'culture of poverty,' which means that poor people do not learn the norms and values that can help them improve their circumstances; hence, they become trapped in a repeated pattern of poverty. Because many poor people live in a narrow world in which all they see is poverty and desperation, they never acquire the skills or the ambition that could help them rise above the poverty level. Since culture is passed down from one generation to the next, parents teach their children to accept their circumstances rather than to work to change them. The cycle of poverty then becomes self-perpetuating."

Another reason the poor tend to suffer from obesity and undernutrition is that they don't have as much access to stores that sell healthy foods as those living in more affluent areas; plus there are more fast-food restaurants in their neighborhoods. In addition, healthier food costs more than less healthy food.

And of course, without enough money, the poor are less apt to attain higher education, and therefore are trapped in low-level, low-paying jobs, continuing the cycle of low income, stress and poor health. Studies have shown that people in low-level jobs feel less in control of their situation and suffer from a higher level of stress than those who feel they have some control over their fate. In addition, they cope less well with the stress, being more apt to deal with it by smoking or other unhealthy behaviors than those of a higher socioeconomic status.

All of these factors combine to leave the poor at a great disadvantage in our society.

Maybe they aren't starving or even lacking modern conveniences. But they are held back from the "pursuit of happiness" that the Founding Fathers saw as an inalienable right back when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Surely as a nation, we can do better than this.

The Importance of the Manmade Environment - Blog Action Day

I was going to write about the George W. Bush's administration's record on the environment. I did a quick search and found that there are dozens of websites devoted to showing the heinous record Bush has on the environment. Under Bush, the EPA has weakened many laws pertaining to clean air and water, and of course there is always the threat of drilling for oil in sensitive areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

However, there were so many sites that listed out all of the actions Bush and his government have taken to denigrate the environment that I just felt as if it was too easy - like shooting fish in a barrel. And a lot of the sites were only updated at the time of the most recent elections so finding more recent information would have been more time-consuming. If you want a summary of actions by the Bush Administration that hurt our environment, please see this site.

So, instead of that topic, I'm going to write about the importance of parkland in our country and in our lives. So often when we talk of "the evironment," we think only of the wild natural environment, and not the manmade environment. But parks are an important part of the green areas of our country; both the National Parks, and the local parks.

Many people don't realize the planning that went into the creation of the National Park System. They may believe that great tracts of wild land were just set aside and that was the end of it. However, although it is true that a lot of these parks were wilderness, the idea behind the parks was to open them up for people to enjoy.

According to the National Park Service website,

"The artist George Catlin first articulated the idea of large western national parks in 1832, the same year Congress set aside the Hot Springs Reservation in central Arkansas, now known as Hot Springs National Park. On a trip to the Dakotas Catlin worried about the impact of America's westward expansion on Indian civilization, wildlife and wilderness. They might be preserved, he wrote, "by some great protecting policy of government . . . in a magnificent park . . . A nation's park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!"

Then in 1864, Abraham Lincoln authorized the transfer of the Yosemite Valley to the state of California for "public use, resort and recreation." He appointed Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park, as chairman of the board of commissioners established to oversee the administration of the land.

Olmsted had a philosophy of leisure based on the need for ordinary citizens to be exposed to the rhythms of the natural world in order to give them perspective in their busy, rapidly urbanizing, lives. For him this meant that parks had to have restaurants and hotels and carriage paths and trails, so that a leisurely appreciation of nature was possible. His thought was to preserve the wilderness as much as possible while still allowing people to enjoy the parks.

However, Yosemite did not officially become a National Park until naturalist John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Century magazine, lobbied for its designation as a park after seeing that flocks of domestic sheep were destroying the natural environment in 1889. As a result, on October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of land to be preserved, which became Yosemite National Park. It included the area surrounding Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove were ceded from the state of California's control and included with Yosemite National Park in 1906.

Yellowstone was actually the first official National Park, designated in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant.

Many more areas were set aside as national parks after these two. You can find a full list of them on the National Park Service website.

The Olmsted vision for the national parks was similar to his vision for the urban parks he designed, but on a larger scale.

Along with Calvert Vaux, Olmsted had designed Central Park in 1858. He envisioned the park as a place of respite for people of all different backgrounds and ethnicities. His vision of parkland included wide open spaces, curving pathways, and separation of traffic from footpaths. He objected to including too many types of active recreation or buildings, as his art was done with nature itself.

Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm went on to design many other famous parks and landscapes, including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the "Emerald Necklace" park system in Boston and the Arnold Arboretum, the grounds of Stanford University, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, and more.

The Olmsted firm designed the Essex County Park System, the first county park system in the country. By this point Olmsted was at the end of his career and his sons had taken over the business, still carrying on his philosophy of landscape design. Branch Brook Park was the first park designed for the system, in 1898. A new book on Branch Brook Park has recently been published as part of Images of America series if you would like more information.

This scene is a band concert at Branch Brook Park in 1907 (from the Essex County website).
















Today parks are more important than ever, providing green space for children and adults to enjoy during hot summer days, being used for both active and passive recreation. Parks are green oases in the heart of our cities, and even beyond the pleasure they give the residents, they also serve a useful purpose in helping keep the air clean, and providing a pervious surface so water can be absorbed during heavy rains or flooding.

But funding for all of our parks is dwindling, and unless more money is continually allocated to parks, these precious resources deteriorate. Ten years ago our local park was run down, full of litter, with broken benches, deteriorating buildings and graffiti-ridden bridges.

Now, as a result of efforts of our local neighborhood group, in conjunction with new leadership at the county level, the park has returned to its former glory and once again is the jewel in the middle of our semi-urban neighborhood.

But it was only through state grant money that this was able to be accomplished. And government cutbacks continue to threaten the availability of this source of funding. We must remain alert to ensure that the manmade landscapes in our midst continue to be maintained and improved.