Original art by Kakoli Mitra: ‘Poverty as a result of communities being severed from their ecowebs,’ digital (2025).
The mainstream defines poverty in terms of low income, advocating for interventions that increase monetary livelihoods. Conversely, FiveBecomings’ approach to alleviate poverty is to enable communities to themselves fulfill their basic needs by restoring their ecosymbiotic self-reliance, thus bypassing money.
Original art by Kakoli Mitra: ‘Fulfilling basic needs through ecosymbiotic self-reliance,’ digital (2025).
Ecosymbiotic self-reliance enables communities to sustainably procure from the ecowebs they inhabit the resources required to produce the Commodities/Services (C/S) that fulfill the community’s basic needs, which encompass not only tangible objects but intangibles like dignity, connectedness, and meaning.
Original art by Kakoli Mitra: ‘The Ādi-Knowtep of each ecosymbiotic community is rooted in the community’s ecoweb and their collective and individual ecoselves,’ digital (2025).
Revitalizing the Ādi-Knowtep (ancient Indigenous Knowledge-Technologies-Practices) and identities of human communities, along with the biodiversity of their ecowebs, is essential in (re-)establishing community ecosymbiotic resilience and, thus, the interconnected wellbeing of humans and ecologies (ecosymbiotic wellbeing).
Figure 1. Original art by Kakoli Mitra: ‘An Ecological Web (Ecoweb) showing living components, including humans (labeled with white text in black boxes), and abiotic (non-living) components (labeled with purple text in white boxes),’ digital (2025).
An ecoweb is an interconnected network of diverse living (including humans) and abiotic components that have evolved together over time in a particular niche of Earth through Adaptation Feedback Loops, thus mutually beneficial to and dependent on each other (ecosymbiotic).
