Theme

Humanity depicts poverty,

poverty depicts humanity?


A question of cause and a quest for solutions

In the early days, sustainability mostly was about ecology, about saving the planet from man-made ecological disasters, about saving forests and rivers and birds and about teaching young people how to take care of their environment.

There is no doubt that this is still very important.

During the last years, we have felt that it is time to focus on other aspects of sustainability, especially social aspects.

It is important to acknowledge that there is still a lot of poverty, a lot of striking poverty in the world, even though quite a bit of progress has been made in the past decades if you look at the statistics.

And poverty is not something that strikes countries in Africa and southern Asia only. In many European countries, a growing part of the society is living under the official poverty line.

How can we deal with the fact that there is poverty? What does this teach us? Do we have to accept that there is poverty? Is poverty good for something? Do successful societies even need poverty? Do rich countries need the poverty of other countries for their success? Or is it just the other way round – would it help the rich if the poor weren’t poor any longer but also rich?

There are many answers to even more questions, help us ask good questions and try to give good answers during the conference if you can.

Read the texts and links on our interactive pages to prepare for this conference.

And contribute to our interactive pages if you wish!

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