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| In the sandbox you can '''play''' with ''wiki syntax'' and more. | | In the sandbox you can '''play''' with ''wiki syntax'' and more. |
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| After the Second World War, the chemical industries of the West shifted their
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| attention back to civilian applications, including the large scale
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| production of synthetic
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| urea, organo-chlorines and other fertilizers and pesticides. These agrochemicals were
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| marketed supposedly to provide additional nutrition for farmers' crops and to kill crop
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| pests. However, farmers and governments did not realize that these products also killed,
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| incapacitated, weakened, or otherwise made life difficult for very important but littleknown
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| creatures: soil organisms which turned organic matter into natural plant food, and
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| friendly organisms like predators and parasites which kept pest populations in check.
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| These creatures comprised a vast, largely invisible and unrecognized commons which all
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| farmers unknowingly tapped into, every time they planted seeds and grew crops. In their
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| defense, the chemical industry might claim that they did not know either (which would be
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| an admission of recklessness, if not negligence). But this excuse would be untenable by
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| the 1960s, when the chemical industry viciously attacked Rachel Carson and her book
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| Silent Spring, which had called attention to the harmful effects of DDT and other
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| agrochemicals on nontarget
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| organisms, including human beings.
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|
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| In effect, the chemical industry was selling farmers and governments a deadly
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| technological Trojan Horse, an anti-abundance
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| poisoned pill. Agrochemicals appeared to
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| offer more abundant harvests; in truth, their deployment would gradually weaken and take
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| the life out of the farmers' biological support systems such as natural sources of plant
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| food and pest enemies. As more agrochemicals were used, the diverse soil populations
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| dwindled, the soil became less fertile and farmers' crops starved. To keep the plants from
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| starving, more synthetic fertilizers were added, which caused the living soil populations
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| to dwindle even further. As the predator and parasite populations likewise dwindled, pest
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| populations went up. So farmers had to spray more pesticides, which then killed even
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| more predators and parasites. More recent studies based on the theory of trophobiosis
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| suggest that synthetic fertilizers actually make plants more attractive to pests.
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| Farmers who took the poisoned pill were caught in the trap and fell into
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| agrochemical addiction, draining life out of the soil and around the crops.
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|
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| In the 1960s, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)4 introduced IR8,
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| the first of a series of new “highyielding
| |
| varieties” (HYV) of rice, whose high yields partly
| |
| came from their better responsiveness to chemical treatment. Farmers were wary and few
| |
| were willing to let go of their traditional varieties. Drawn by aggressive government
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| subsidies and lending programs, however, more and more farmers switched. As they did,
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| they also stopped planting their heirloom varieties, which were soon lost as the old seeds
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| they had saved dried up and died. As the heirloom varieties disappeared and HYV-dependence
| |
| grew, farmers also lost their selection and breeding skills.
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| Agrochemicals and the new chemically responsive
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| varieties would eventually be
| |
| promoted as the “Green” Revolution. Even today, this technological poisoned pill
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| continues to keep millions of farmers addicted to agrochemicals, mired in poverty and
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| debt.
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|
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| Another facet in the technological substitutions of this period was the gradual
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| replacement of work animals by farm machinery. In the Philippines, for instance,
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| carabaos were the farmers' main source of mechanical power. Carabaos also grazed the
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| less fertile areas around the farm, their dung enriching the soil. The animal usually
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| recovered by itself from injury or sickness. Even more – perhaps the most amazing thing
| |
| of all – the female carabao gave birth to another carabao every two years or so. Yet,
| |
| through the same poisoned pill strategy, farm machinery suppliers and the government
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| eventually managed to get many farmers to switch to a mechanical power source that was
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| fuelled by costly imported gasoline instead of free grass, gave out noxious pollutants
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| instead of milk and natural fertilizer, required a skilled technician and costly spare parts if
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| it stopped working, and of course never gave birth to its own replacement.
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|
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|
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| **
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|
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| Counterproductive
| |
| efforts to control abundance and scarcity have occurred in
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| other fields as well:
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|
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| * Drug laws make medically effective
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| herbal preparations inaccessible to many.
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| Ironically, herbs easily grown in backyards and community gardens, whose
| |
| preparations would be illegal if prescribed by traditional healers, are often the
| |
| basis for very expensive drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical firms. It is not a
| |
| coincidence that many of these firms are owned by the same agrochemical
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| companies which control the seed industry.
| |
|
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| * Through misleading advertising and collusion with hospitals and medical
| |
| professionals, formula milk companies have managed to undermine mothers'
| |
| confidence in their own breast milk. This had led to a decline in breastfeeding in a
| |
| number of Asian countries.23 As mothers try substitutes; their production of milk
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| slows down and eventually stops, creating a vast new market for formula milk.
| |
|
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| * A traditional Filipino song about plants around the hut (“Bahay Kubo”), taught
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| to every child in grade school, enumerates 18 food plants that include legumes,
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| greens, root crops, seeds, nuts, and spices. The song omits many more. Filipinos
| |
| have become so fixated on Western foods and diets that they overlook the great
| |
| variety of indigenous food sources, many of which simply grow untended like
| |
| weeds in their backyards. The monoculture mindset treats these food sources as
| |
| weeds that must be suppressed. Razed by farm mechanization and the use of
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| herbicides, most of them have now disappeared from people's backyards, from
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| their diets, and from their consciousness, creating real food scarcity and
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| malnutrition.
| |
|
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| * Organic products are scarce and expensive because a system biased towards
| |
| chemicals imposes on organic producers the burden of proof: detailed record keeping,
| |
| testing, inspection, certification and labelling. What if producers of
| |
| chemically treated
| |
| crops and foods, not organic producers, were instead required
| |
| by law, in accordance with the “polluter pays” principle, to keep detailed
| |
| records of chemical treatments; get their products regularly inspected and tested by
| |
| accredited laboratories for minimum residue levels; undergo thirdparty
| |
| certification; and follow mandatory labelling requirements to identify which
| |
| chemicals and by what amounts their food products have been exposed to? If this
| |
| were so, the price tags of both organic and chemically treated
| |
| foods would change
| |
| dramatically in favor of organics.
| |
|
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| **
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|
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| Creating abundance is a matter of reproducing a good over and over again, until
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| more than enough is available for everyone's need or even for everyone's capacity to
| |
| consume.
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|
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| In nature, the tendency towards bountiful abundance is obvious, especially where
| |
| seasonal variations highlight the contrast between abundance and scarcity. Prehistoric
| |
| artefacts of fertility goddesses as well as harvest festivals and rituals still practiced today
| |
| show the extent abundance has been recognized and sought.
| |
|
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| Abundance is inherent in the reproductive processes of life. Natural abundance is
| |
| simply Life reasserting itself through the endless cycle of reproduction by every life form
| |
| of their own kind. This is the engine of abundance in nature and in agriculture. The
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| process is self limiting
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| too. As every available ecological niche is filled up, species
| |
| gradually form a food web and settle into a dynamic balance, with closed material cycles
| |
| ensuring that the balance is maintained. This enables the processes of abundance to
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| continue indefinitely.
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|
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| Sharing information does not diminish or deplete but rather multiplies and
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| enriches it. Shared information begets more information. The engine of information
| |
| abundance is the inherent human desire to communicate, to seek information and
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| knowledge, and to share them, an urge that gets more fully expressed as the cost of
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| sharing goes down. The cost of reproducing electronic signals is now approaching zero.
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| With digital technology, books, artworks, music and video can now be stored in the same
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| format as software and databases: as a long string of binary values. From these ones and
| |
| zeroes, with the right equipment and algorithm, an exact copy of the digital original or a
| |
| faithful copy of the analog original, can be reconstructed. Once stored digitally and made
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| available in easily searchable form on a global network, an unlimited number of users
| |
| may now get any number of exact copies of the work. Who cannot recognize the
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| abundance of human knowledge, experience and creative work made possible by the
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| Internet? As more and more people discover its possibilities for sharing freely, the whole
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| range of human skills, thought and feeling is now being made available through this
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| medium.
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|
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| From an information perspective, abundance in nature and in agriculture is, in a
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| way, driven by the inherent program within genetic information to reproduce itself. This
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| abundance, however, must eventually express itself in terms of biomass and is therefore
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| constrained by material limits. Information abundance, on the other hand, is of the non material
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| variety. Thus information goods offer the promise of practically unlimited
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| abundance, constrained mainly by the limits of human creativity, the storage capacity of
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| media, and the availability of electricity to power servers on the Internet twenty four
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| hours a day.
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|
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| The driving forces behind abundance in the agriculture and information sectors
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| have been identified. In agriculture, it is the inherent urge in every life form to reproduce
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| its own kind, fuelled by the practically limitless energy from the sun. In the information
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| sector, it is the inherent urge in every human being to communicate with others, share
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| knowledge and information with them, and produce knowledge together, given full
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| expression by the near zero cost of sharing made possible with digital electronic
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| technology.
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|
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| Abundance helps to meet human needs and wants and should therefore be
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| welcomed.
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|
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|
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| What is the driving force behind antiabundance?
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|
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| The answer should be clear by now. Attacks against abundance have been mostly
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| initiated by business firms or by governments. Where governments undertook these
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| measures, they have done so at the instance of some business firms, which in the final
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| analysis reaped the benefits of the government measures.
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|
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| Looking more closely at the logic of business firms, it is obvious that the
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| immediate effect of restricting abundance is to reduce supply and increase overall
| |
| demand. These in turn raise prices or keep their levels high. If the costs of production
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| change little or not at all and prices go up, then profits go up. This is the logic behind
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| corporate efforts to develop technologies and influence State policies that give them
| |
| closer control over the abundance and scarcity of goods: to create the best conditions for
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| maximizing profits. Indeed, they may maximize profits, but may not necessarily be the
| |
| best way to encourage creativity. Free/open source software and farmer bred
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| varieties show that creativity can continue to flourish even without the attraction of monopoly
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| earnings.
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|
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| Shouldn't this selfish end give way to higher societal goals? The economist's
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| answer is that society's higher goals are indeed served when everyone pursues their own
| |
| self interest in free competition with others. In fact, economists argue, the competitive
| |
| pursuit of individual gain accomplishes overall social goals better, even if this “was no
| |
| part of his intention,” than when individuals consciously try to advance society's higher
| |
| goals. This idea that individual pursuit of self interest
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| not only leads to but is actually the
| |
| best path towards overall social good became the moral basis for capitalist society. This
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| was the programmed into business firms as an “urge” to maximize gain, and they do so
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| by controlling abundance and scarcity in their favor. This is the driving force behind anti abundance.
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| Because human beings were a complex bundle of urges, emotions and motivations
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| who often acted irrationally (i.e., regardless of self interest)
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| from an economist's
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| perpective, corporations became the ideal economic agents, pursuing nothing but
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| maximum gain for themselves based on the economic theory of laissez faire capitalism.
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|
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| They are therefore driven to undermine abundance and create artificial scarcity as an
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| unintended but logical consequence of their internal programming, creating a modern
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| class of rentiers who accumulate wealth by charging fees for access to the resources they
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| control.
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|
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| Constructing a theory of abundance
| |
|
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|
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| Economics has always assumed a condition of scarcity and defined its role as the
| |
| efficient allocation of scarce resources relative to unlimited human wants. Nowhere does
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| abundance figure in the definition or goals of economics.
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|
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| Practically all economic textbooks are premised on scarcity. Check their index:
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| “scarcity” would be found in the early pages – the first chapter, probably; “abundance”
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| would be missing, creating a blind spot among economists. Samuelson and Nordhaus
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| write in page 2 of their textbook: “At the core, [economics] is devoted to understanding
| |
| how society allocates its scare resources. Along the way to studying the implications of
| |
| scarcity, economics tries to figure out the 1001 puzzles of everyday life.”30 Some books
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| might refer to “overproduction”, suggesting an anomaly to be avoided or corrected.
| |
| Misunderstanding abundance as overproduction logically leads to counterproductive
| |
| measures restricting abundance, a misapplication of concepts developed under
| |
| assumptions of scarcity.
| |
|
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| Yet, once we open our minds, we should see abundance all around us. Solar
| |
| energy has been with us from the beginning. So have clean air and water, plants and
| |
| animals, soil life, forests, and the astounding variety of life on Earth, now threatened.
| |
| Since the Internet emerged, we have also seen an extraordinary abundance of information
| |
| and knowledge and no lack of people willing to share them freely. Just look at the Web,
| |
| Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and all the lesser known but incredibly useful
| |
| efforts to make information and knowledge freely available on the Internet. New
| |
| technologies promise even more abundance: in bandwidth through fiber optics, in air time
| |
| through spread spectrum technology, and in storage through new media.
| |
| Clearly, abundance is as much a feature of the real world as scarcity. To
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| understand this blind spot of economics and harness it fully for the human good, we need
| |
| to construct theories of abundance to complement the theories of scarcity that dominate
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| economics today. In fact, economists who talk of “relative scarcity” only need a minor
| |
| leap of logic to recognize “relative abundance”. After all, a glass that is halfempty
| |
| is also half full.
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|
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| Consider the variations in abundance. It can be precarious (collapse imminent),
| |
| temporary (lasting less than a lifetime), short term
| |
| (a few lifetimes), medium term
| |
| (many lifetimes) or long term
| |
| (longer than human existence). It can be relative (enjoyed by a
| |
| limited number), local (confined to a specific area) or absolute (accessible to all). The
| |
| abundance of solar energy and other energy forms associated with it, such as hydro, wind
| |
| and wave energy, is obviously longterm.
| |
| Solar energy is universal, while hydro, wind
| |
| and wave energy are more local. Coal's abundance is medium term,
| |
| if the estimates are
| |
| correct that the world's reserves may last for several hundred years more (i.e., many
| |
| human generations). Oil, which is perhaps good for another generation or two at current
| |
| extraction rates, is short term.
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|
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| In addition, fossil fuel abundance is relative because it is
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| not accessible to all, but only to large firms with enough financial, technical and human
| |
| resources. While absolute, universal abundance can have free/open access, others may
| |
| need some form of management. Local resources may need to restrict or even exclude
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| outsiders. Extraction rates may need to be regulated. Moratoriums may even have to be
| |
| imposed on threatened resources.
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|
| |
| The ultimate goal of any management regime should be to ensure against any
| |
| failure of abundance.
| |
|
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| The following specific goals are suggested:
| |
|
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| 1. Make the resource accessible to a greater number of people – ideally, to all.
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|
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| This is merely a restatement of the goal of social justice. Potable water, for instance, is so
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| important to human survival that this goal should be paramount for this resource,
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| abundant or not. For water – and for land, as well – Gandhi's observation rings true:
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|
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| “There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.” These
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| resources can become abundant for all or scarce for many, depending on how they are
| |
| managed. In a country like the Philippines, land seems scarce to the millions who do not
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| own a home lot because the ownership structure allows a few to own thousands of
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| hectares of land. Agrarian reform is, in effect, an effort to keep land abundant for every
| |
| rural household that is willing to farm land. Some have also argued that familysize
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| farms can be as productive and efficient, if not more, than huge, corporateheld
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| tracts.
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|
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|
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| 2. Make sure the resource will last for generations, preferably indefinitely.
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|
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| This means turning limited, temporary or short term
| |
| abundance into long term
| |
| abundance. This is also a restatement of the goal of sustainability. Rain forests, for
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| instance, have been providing countless generations of indigenous tribes everything they
| |
| needed for survival. At current rates of depletion, however, our generation has turned rain
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| forests into a short term
| |
| or temporary resource that will be gone in a few generations, if
| |
| not within our generation. Economists should be familiar with the difference between
| |
| income and capital, natural resource stocks and flows. In the rain forest case, ensuring
| |
| long term abundance means limiting the consumption of forest products to the natural
| |
| income we get out of the forest, and refraining from eating into the capital stock.
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| Strategies for managing nonrenewable
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| resources, or information resources, would of
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| course be different.
| |
|
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|
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| 3. Build a cascade of abundance.
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|
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| Abundance in one sector (or of one good) can
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| help create abundance in another sector (or of another good). The food chain is a good
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| example of abundance at one level (solar energy) supporting abundance at the next level
| |
| (plants) which supports abundance at a higher level (herbivores), etc. By building
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| linkages among farm components, permaculture32 teaches how one type of abundance can
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| be made to support another through conscious design. A similar cascade occurs on the
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| Internet, which supports the Web, which in turn supports search engines and new
| |
| applications like wikis and blogs, one abundance building on another. The sun is a
| |
| flexible energy source that can provide, through collectors and concentrators, a wide
| |
| range of temperatures to match various enduses.
| |
|
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| By tapping it more, industry can
| |
| harness potentially huge amounts of energy for various productive activities, opening up
| |
| possibilities for creating abundance in many other sectors. Photovoltaic (PV) cells made
| |
| from silica, also an abundant resource, can transform sunlight into cheap electricity for
| |
| industrial, commercial and home use. This can make viable the electrolytic extraction
| |
| from water, another abundant resource, of hydrogen and oxygen. These can be stored and
| |
| later used in fuel cells, holding the promise of a pollution free
| |
| hydrogen based economy.
| |
|
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| Most computer equipment, which are silicon based
| |
| like PV cells, have either been
| |
| halving in price or doubling in capacity every few years or so. LCD projectors now sell
| |
| for a fifth of their price ten years ago. If PV prices follow suit, perhaps due again to
| |
| China's entry, we can look forward to a cascade of solar based
| |
| abundance in the future.
| |
|
| |
| Eventually we should be able to recognize conditions that lead to abundance and
| |
| then learn how to create more abundance. We alrady have a rough idea how abundance
| |
| happens in nature, in agriculture and in the information sector. We simply need to nurture
| |
| the forces that generate such abundance. One challenge is how to emulate ecological
| |
| processes such as the cyclic loops of nature to create a similar material abundance in the
| |
| industrial sector, without disrupting natural cycles
| |
|
| |
|
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| 4. Develop an ethic that nurtures abundance.
| |
|
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| To manage abundance well, its
| |
| community of beneficiaries must adopt a behavioral ruleset and the corresponding
| |
| enforcement mechanisms. It is desirable to eventually turn this ruleset into a mindset,
| |
| similar to Leopold's land ethic33 and Postel's water ethic, that makes the other goals of
| |
| social justice, sustainability, cascading abundance, and dynamic balance second nature to
| |
| all.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 5. Attain dynamic balance.
| |
|
| |
| In a finite world, material abundance cannot grow
| |
| indefinitely. Nature shows us how abundance can occur indefinitely through a dynamic
| |
| balance (i.e., harmony) of abundant elements connected in closed material cycles. Citing
| |
| permaculture again as example, a similar balance can be attained in a farm by modelling
| |
| it after long lived self regenerating
| |
| ecological systems to design what are, in effect,
| |
| forests or ponds of food and cash crops. After we learn to design similar closed loops in
| |
| industry, we can bring this sector back into harmony with the rest of the living world.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Abundance creates commons
| |
|
| |
| If we review history, and perhaps prehistory as well, we would see that abundance
| |
| has often led to the creation of commons. In communities that respond to abundance by
| |
| treating it as a common pool resource, community members tend to act cooperatively to
| |
| manage the commons so that the goals of social justice and sustainability are met and the
| |
| risk of failure in abundance is minimized.
| |
|
| |
| Commons management involves not only economic rules but also cultural and
| |
| political factors such as conscious community decisions, appeals to the common good,
| |
| and the values of sharing, cooperation, altruism and community spirit. It often relies not
| |
| only on prices but also on restrictions, prohibitions and taboos. Ancient tribes and other
| |
| traditional societies have evolved complex social norms of behavior and hierarchies of
| |
| communal use and access rights that have served them well in managing abundance and
| |
| the commons for many generations. Similar norms have likewise evolved among
| |
| successful modern commons such as free/open source software and the Wikipedia.
| |
|
| |
| Their institutions and methods for governing the commons have proved even more
| |
| useful for threatened resources as well as resources that have actually become scarce, by
| |
| helping meet goals of social justice and sustainability. In a number of instances, fishing
| |
| grounds and forest reserves have been nursed back to abundance, thanks to the proper
| |
| management of these commons.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| **
| |
|
| |
| Abundance as a field of study
| |
|
| |
| Because abundance is clearly present in many aspects of human life, it is obviously an
| |
| interesting phenomenon and its study should logically be a major field of study. Yet, economics
| |
| practically denies abundance, defining itself as the study of efficient options in the context of scarcity.
| |
| Economists often say that when a good starts becoming abundant, it stops becoming interesting,
| |
| because the economic problem has been solved. If indeed, abundance is recognized as the solution to
| |
| the problem of scarcity, shouldn't it be studied even more? Shouldn't we learn the conditions that lead
| |
| to abundance, and the conditions that keep it going? Shouldn't we acquire the knowledge and skill to
| |
| generate abundance at will? Shouldn't we master the art and science of making one form of abundance
| |
| create another, and another, leading to a cascade of abundance?
| |
|
| |
| Abundance is simply one end of a continuum that has scarcity at its other end. Obviously,
| |
| anything that is relatively scarce is, at the same time, relatively abundant. For completeness and by any
| |
| form of logic, the entire continuum should deserve our attention and study. We need a new economic
| |
| science that studies both scarcity and abundance.
| |
|
| |
| In fact, many of the questions raised here go beyond the realm of economics. They need a
| |
| multi-disciplinary approach that includes expertise from the social, natural and physical sciences.
| |
|
| |
| Indeed, the questions raised by a study of abundance are worthy scientific challenges.
| |
|
| |
| Let us apply our new-found awareness and curiosity about abundance and make the first step
| |
| towards studying it.
| |
|
| |
| Let us see how abundance may be classified..
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Classifying abundance
| |
|
| |
| Abundance may be classified in various ways, each way revealing additional facets about the
| |
| phenomenon and giving us hints about tapping it for the human good. For instance, abundance may be
| |
| classified according to:
| |
|
| |
| Space.
| |
|
| |
| Is it, like a waterfall, available to a few communities only? Local sources need local
| |
| management, where face-to-face interaction between acquaintances may ease the tension of resource
| |
| conflicts. In fact, many resources are actually local, though nation-states have appropriated these for
| |
| themselves and turned them into national patrimony. The Regalian doctrine that favor national over
| |
| local control of resources is, in many countries, vestige of their colonial past. The continuing debates
| |
| between local and national decision-making in the case of forests, dams and mine sites reflect this
| |
| ongoing tension between local and national management of sources of abundance. This conflict
| |
| becomes every more complicated with the entry of corporations, who range the globe for resources to
| |
| tap until these are depleted and move on. Some sources of abundance, like seas and great rivers, bring
| |
| benefits to more than one country, and therefore require even more delicate and sensitive negotiations.
| |
| Resource conflicts may erupt into wars, especially with resources which are being gradually depleted.
| |
| The truly global sources of abundance, like our atmosphere and the oceans, require complex
| |
| international management, as can be seen today in the climate change negotiations. Each of these types
| |
| need skill and knowledge not just in the scientific aspects of abundance but in a whole range of areas
| |
| that include political, economic, social, cultural and historical perspectives.
| |
|
| |
| Negotiations between potential beneficiaries and other stakeholders involving spatially-limited
| |
| abundance can be highly unequal due to existing assymetric power relations. This is even truer in the
| |
| case of abundance that is spread over the time dimension, as explained below.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Time.
| |
|
| |
| Is the abundance precarious? Precarious abundance is one whose collapse is imminent
| |
| and might be gone soon, and we had better do something about it quickly if we want to continue
| |
| enjoying its benefits. Is it temporary? This would refer to phenomena that last for less than a human
| |
| lifetime, perhaps a gold rush in some mountainside, or a discovery of a huge pile of guano in an
| |
| isolated island or cavern. Will it last for a few human lifetimes? Then it is a short-term abundance, like
| |
| oil is turning out to be. If it will last many lifetimes more, then it is a medium-term abundance, like,
| |
| possibly, coal. Forests, rivers, lakes, inland seas and other long-term sources of abundance should last
| |
| beyond human existence. But because of our own profligacy, ignorance or indifference, these long-term
| |
| resources have instead been turned into short-term resources that will be gone in a few generations.
| |
|
| |
| This are huge challenges, which should be of interest to all. How do we stop a precarious resource from
| |
| imminent collapse? How do we turn a temporary abundance into a long-lasting one, that can serve not
| |
| only a few but many generations, if not every generation that is yet to come. The seventh generation
| |
| principle of native American Indians, it is said, reckoned decisions in terms of their effects up to the
| |
| seventh generation.
| |
|
| |
| Shouldn't we, given the greater power of our technologies, look even farther into
| |
| the future?
| |
|
| |
| Future generations cannot negotiate for themselves. Neither can plants and animals. Thus, some
| |
| humans must take up the cudgels for these voiceless stakeholders. Negotiating for access is hard
| |
| enough when a resource is abundant, how much more when it becomes scarce, and furthermore, one
| |
| has no voice? This situation demands not only the utmost of cross-species and cross-generation
| |
| empathy from us but also the deepest appreciation of the interconnectedness of generations and species.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Social sectors.
| |
|
| |
| Certain types of abundance are accessible to all, other are accessible only to
| |
| those who have the wealth to exploit them. When the sun is up, poor and rich alike can enjoy the tan,
| |
| the warmth and the Vitamin D. Anyone can set up a solar water heater, a solar food cooker, or a
| |
| photovoltaic panel. But only corporate giants can access the oil and gas within the deep bowels of the
| |
| earth, and the process these into the various fuels they need. It should thus be obvious which abundant
| |
| energy source should receive the highest priority in terms of government research, subsidy and
| |
| preference.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Across species.
| |
|
| |
| Appropriating the world's abundance exclusively for the human is a utilitarian
| |
| perspective that is increasingly under question. A less anthropocentric view concedes the right of other
| |
| species to exist, and therefore to survive. It further concedes other species the right to their own living
| |
| space, a concession that everyone must eventually make, if not for the sake of these species, then also
| |
| for the sake of future generations. This explicit concession is already enshrined in the design principles
| |
| of at least one farming system. Permaculture parcels every farm into several zones. Zone 5 is
| |
| wilderness, a cascade of abundance reserved for other species and not to be casually intruded upon
| |
| even by its so-called human owners, and then only as visitors.5 Reserved wilderness areas within the
| |
| permaculture farm allow us to witness, study and appreciate at close range how nature's abundance, left
| |
| to its own, plays itself out.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Elemental basis.
| |
|
| |
| Pre-history has seen a stone-based as well iron-based eras featuring a specific
| |
| set of abundance that characterize them. Information abundance is silicon-based, dependent on
| |
| technological advances in semiconductors, of which silicon is one, together with the benefits of
| |
| digitalization, which made the reproduction of any number of identical copies over unlimited
| |
| generations a possibility. Ecological abundance is carbon-based. Carbon's natural affinity to hydrogen
| |
| and oxygen created organic substances that formed the basis of life and of reproductive processes.
| |
| These led to the great abundance in nature that is ultimately our very own basis for existence. The
| |
| abundance of solar energy is hydrogen-based. Hopefully, in the future, another hydrogen-based energy
| |
| economy, using hydrogen extracted from water to run fuel cells, can replace the unsustainable fossil
| |
| fuel-based energy economy we have today.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| **
| |
|
| |
| Five types
| |
|
| |
| Taking into account these various ways of classifying abundance, we suggest the following
| |
| tentative classification to highlight the differences among the various types. The first three, in a way,
| |
| represent the three fundamental building blocks of the universe: matter, energy and information. The
| |
| last two take care of opposite or orthogonal concepts and ensure conceptual completeness.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 1. Material abundance
| |
|
| |
| Matter exists both in animate and in inanimate – living and non-living – form. Biological goods
| |
| become abundant because they have evolved, over eons, the built-in means to reproduce themselves
| |
| and yet to maintain a dynamic balance that does not overwhelm the finite world in which they exist.
| |
|
| |
| While the means of reproduction of information goods is external, usually through human agents or
| |
| automatons on the information network, the means of reproduction of biological organisms is internal.
| |
|
| |
| They contain their own programs for reproducing themselves.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Ecological abundance.
| |
|
| |
| Maintaining ecological abundance is less a problem of ensuring the
| |
| right conditions for the reproduction of life and more a problem of ensuring that we humans do not
| |
| destroy those conditions which are favorable to the reproduction of life. Over millions of years, various
| |
| life forms have evolved to optimize their capacity to reproduce themselves under existing ecological
| |
| conditions. All we need to do is to respect these conditions and make sure our human activities do not
| |
| modify them to the extent of threatening the ecological abundance that promises us a perpetual stream
| |
| of ecological benefits. Furthermore, we must learn from the way ecological systems reproduce
| |
| themselves indefinitely without having to grow without limit. The secret is in establishing closed
| |
| material loops fueled by the sun. These closed loops are circular food chains that encompass every
| |
| element of the system. Together, they form a food web that eventually reaches a dynamic balance
| |
| highly resilient to environmental stresses.
| |
|
| |
| Think of depositing money in the bank, where it earns a fixed interest. As long as you don't
| |
| touch the principal and withdraw only the interest earnings, you will get a perpetual stream of benefit
| |
| out of that fixed amount. This used to be the situation in most of the living world, where our natural
| |
| capital gave us a perpetual flow of natural income. As long as human civilizations protected the
| |
| principal and withdrew from nature only a small portion of its products, we would have been able to
| |
| enjoy nature's abundance in perpetuity. Today, in most of our renewable resources, we are drawing not
| |
| only the interest but portions of the principal. In the future, there will be less interest earnings to enjoy,
| |
| and if we go on our unsustainable way, the principal itself will soon be gone. This is the situation today
| |
| in many of our renewable resources.
| |
|
| |
| Do not take the principal-interest analogy too literally because of a moral hazard: bank are often
| |
| engaged in unsustainable lending due to the fractional reserve principle, which create a financial
| |
| bubble. Matter and energy cannot be created and we have to live with the material and energetic limits
| |
| handed on to us by nature. Money, however, can be created by the privileged few, who become
| |
| scandalously rich by simply creating more money for lending and earning interest from, while
| |
| everybody else has to work hard and make sacrifices to earn a living.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Mineral abundance.
| |
|
| |
| Though non-living objects like metals, sand, rock and so on, do not
| |
| reproduce, there are other means of keeping them abundant. We must remember that matter is never
| |
| created or destroyed, only transformed. Consider metals. Even if the world's metallic reserves were all
| |
| eventually mined and used up (this would be an environmental disaster!), the metals will not be gone.
| |
| The millions of tons of gold, silver, iron, copper, aluminum, tin and other metals which have been
| |
| mined from the bowels of the earth for human use on the ground will still be around us. All we need to
| |
| do is locate them, gather them and reprocess into into usable forms once again. The key to abundance
| |
| in inanimate matter is durability, reusability and recycling.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Imagine a programmable weaving machine with built-in facilities to cut and sew, such that
| |
| threads go in at one end of the machine, and shirts, pants, coats, dresses and other wearables come out
| |
| at the other end. The process is software-driven. You can go to the Internet, where people might share
| |
| their own designs for a particular style of wear, download the software freely, customize the
| |
| dimensions to your specific requirements, and run the program on the machine. One can easily imagine
| |
| a similar programmable fabricator for, say, wood. Give it a piece of plywood or a length of 2x4, as
| |
| many as necessary, and with the right program downloaded from the Internet, you can make your own
| |
| chair, frame, shelf, table and other furniture or toys. This approach is already possible with metal, using
| |
| software-controlled universal milling machines.
| |
|
| |
| Instead of instead of cutting, chipping or scraping away material from a workpiece, one can also
| |
| work from the other end and add material to a workpiece. As early as the 1990s, a “3-d” printer that
| |
| deposited epoxy layer by layer to a workpiece, to build up any three-dimensional shape, was already
| |
| commercially available.7\ It could make toys, gears, intricate parts, moulds and a thousand other things.
| |
| The only limit was one's imagination, captured in software. Such 3d printers have since become
| |
| common commercial items. If the working raw material were made recyclable too, then this can be
| |
| another answer to the challenge of making material abundance accessible to more people. Enabling the
| |
| machine to handle a mix of plastic, wood, metal and electronics can turn it into a software-controlled
| |
| personal fabricator. This is what MIT's Media Lab has been working on since the turn of the century.8 It
| |
| doesn't even have to be a personal fabricator. A whole community can share one.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 2. Energy abundance
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Renewables.
| |
|
| |
| Although it is one of the least tapped by modern technologies, our greatest source
| |
| of energy abundance is the sun.
| |
|
| |
| Solar energy is a source that is incredibly immense and practically infinite in terms of human
| |
| scales. It continuously provides a steady source of diffuse energy, from a distance that is far enough to
| |
| spare us most of the damaging side effects of the infernal processes that fuel the stupendous generation
| |
| of that energy. Through the appropriate use of collectors and concentrators, the sun's diffuse energy
| |
| may be transformed into medium- to high-quality heat which can then be converted into other forms for
| |
| a wide range of uses.
| |
|
| |
| Solar energy is still not absolute in abundance. It is not available at night, for instance.10 So, in
| |
| addition to collectors and concentrators, storage devices are also needed to make it available when the
| |
| sun is below the horizon.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Non-renewables.
| |
|
| |
| Non-renewable sources of energy are a special challenge. Once gone, they
| |
| are gone forever. That is a huge ethical burden to a society with a conscience. We have built our
| |
| civilizations on the shaky and short-term foundations of fossil fuels or the shakier foundations of
| |
| radioactive fuels. As a result of this flawed decision, we have reached a dead-end, ending up with a
| |
| global greenhouse problem resulting in climate change, sea-level rise and other threats to our very
| |
| survival. There is urgent need to shift gears, change direction and to focus on various renewable energy
| |
| sources that can provide us comparable abundance in the long-term rather than the short-term.
| |
|
| |
| Non-renewable abundance is like keeping your money in a private vault, where it earns no
| |
| interest. The total amount diminishes every time you withdraw some. However large your initial store
| |
| of money is, you will sooner or later exhaust it and end up with nothing. This is the situation with our
| |
| non-renewable energy resources such as oil and gas. However abundant they are today, once used, they
| |
| are gone forever.
| |
|
| |
| Only the energy from sun, perhaps, given its stupendously massive stock of hydrogen, can be
| |
| considered as good as infinite, even if it will likewise use up its fuel billions of years from now.
| |
| Paul Hawken has proposed guidelines for managing non-renewables that can be the starting
| |
| point for an ethical management of non-renewable energy resources.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 3. Non-material abundance
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Information abundance.
| |
|
| |
| This is truly a special type of abundance, because information is not
| |
| lost whenever it is shared. In fact, sharing information multiplies it, and enables everyone to create
| |
| even more of it. Because of what economists call the “substitution effect” (consumers tend to shift from
| |
| higher priced goods to lower-priced ones that can more or less do the same job or fulfill the same
| |
| need), the information content of other goods will also keep rising as long as using information is
| |
| cheaper than other approaches. Information abundance can be expected to lead to a cascade of other
| |
| types of abundance.
| |
|
| |
| The main problem today with information abundance is the mismatch between the two trends:
| |
| diminishing cost and the promise of universal access on one hand, and, on the other hand, the legal
| |
| regime of IPRs which threatens information abundance with restrictive laws that unrealistically prohibit
| |
| sharing, copying and other forms of reproducing information. The second challenge is how to
| |
| encourage intellectual activity without intellectual property. The success of free/open source software
| |
| and the extension of this concept to other fields has already shown that monopoly is not the only way,
| |
| or even the best way, to encourage intellectual activity. More varied ways of rewarding intellectual
| |
| work need to be evolved.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| Psychic abundance.
| |
|
| |
| The term “psychic” is used here not in the ESP sense but in the same
| |
| psychocultural sense as “psychic rewards” (i.e. non-monetary, non-material), . It refers to certain
| |
| human feelings and concepts, variously described as “emotional” or even “spiritual”, which are not
| |
| captured by the term “information”. Psychic abundance covers phenomena which cannot be digitized,
| |
| copied or reproduced like information. These include love, happiness, companionship, peace, joy,
| |
| tranquillity, beauty, wisdom, and related concepts. These concepts are often associated with a certain
| |
| kind of abundance. Many references to abundance on the Internet are of this kind. These references
| |
| clearly express certain human needs that cannot be met with information, energy or material
| |
| phenomena but require a special human response that, like the rest, also needs to be studied, learned
| |
| and mastered.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 4. Non-abundance (scarcity)
| |
|
| |
| Included for completeness, this refers to our old friend scarcity. Obviously a spectrum of
| |
| possibilities lie between absolute abundance and absolute scarcity, and most of what we need and want
| |
| lie somewhere along this spectrum. Thus a full consideration of what needs to be done to reduce
| |
| scarcity and enhance abundance requires a study of the causes, conditions and consequences of these
| |
| complementary phenomena. Economics, which has been studying scarcity from the earliest times, must
| |
| now expand its coverage to include abundance.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| 5. Negative abundance
| |
|
| |
| Again, for want of a better term, this refers to an abundance of “bads”, like poisons in the
| |
| environment, garbage, pollution, greenhouse gases, and various undesirables, which today are often the
| |
| side-effects of the production of desirables. In some cases, we are so overwhelmed by these “bads” that
| |
| the entire production process has to be radically overhauled to find ways of producing the goods minus
| |
| the bads.
| |