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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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| | You answered (11jan09): |
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| After the Second World War, the chemical industries of the West shifted their
| | "As free software moves from the margins to center stage, more and more |
| 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
| | corporations adapt to the model, and pay programmers to do such parts of the |
| technological Trojan Horse, an anti-abundance
| | free software as needed for themselves, but they use the open licenses. |
| poisoned pill. Agrochemicals appeared to
| | So these corporations compete, but also collaborate through the common |
| offer more abundant harvests; in truth, their deployment would gradually weaken and take
| | platform of free software. |
| 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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|
| In the 1960s, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)4 introduced IR8,
| | For Linux, 75% of programmers are now paid by such corporations, which means |
| the first of a series of new “highyielding
| | they have an increasing influence over the direction of development, have a |
| varieties” (HYV) of rice, whose high yields partly
| | seat in the Foundations etc; (...) |
| came from their better responsiveness to chemical treatment. Farmers were wary and few
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| 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
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| 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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| Another facet in the technological substitutions of this period was the gradual
| | The reality of the various projects is then strongly influenced by the governance model, |
| replacement of work animals by farm machinery. In the Philippines, for instance,
| | which can be controlled primarily by a community-oriented foundation, or by |
| carabaos were the farmers' main source of mechanical power. Carabaos also grazed the
| | a corporate-oriented format." |
| 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
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| of all – the female carabao gave birth to another carabao every two years or so. Yet,
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| 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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| | Some remarks about the existence of "hybrid forms" and about the dynamics of these forms. |
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| **
| | The reality you describe is a hybrid social form of production, borrowing aspects from both systems, capitalism and P2P, or peer production. Using your definition of peer production (free and open input; free volunteering production; universally available output), one can say that there are hybrid aspects at the three moments of the process: 1. input, raw material is partly capitalistic as the computers, the offices, etc. are privately owned by the corporations (as IBM), but, for software production, free/open software is also a "raw material"; 2. production is not based on free volunteering, but some aspects of the production are new, non capitalistic, as the cooperation between programmers of antagonistic corporations; 3. the output can be oriented by corporations more towards their own needs (commercial management software, for example) but the output remains universally available. |
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| Counterproductive
| | The "social networking" also generates hybrid forms. If you take MySpace or YouTube: 1. the input is partly capitalistic (the infrastructures and the financing by advertising), but for the rest most of the input (videos, blogs, etc.) are free and open; 2. the production process is based partially on capitalist wage relations for the infrastructure management, but the rest is based on free volunteering; 3. the output is supposed to be universally available but corporations impose limits and try to extend these limits, provoking open conflicts with users/producers. (See for example: http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2008/12/31/why-i-am-deleting-my-myspace-account-and-you-should-too/) |
| efforts to control abundance and scarcity have occurred in
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| other fields as well:
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| * Drug laws make medically effective
| | Hybrid forms also developed in the past transitions between modes of production. Between the 6th and the 10h century, many landlords, including the Church, had simultaneously slaves and serfs (or "coloni" which were the first form of serfs). Between the 12th century and the 19th century many hybrid forms developed especially in the cities where capitalism developed within feudal relationships. |
| herbal preparations inaccessible to many.
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| Ironically, herbs easily grown in backyards and community gardens, whose
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| preparations would be illegal if prescribed by traditional healers, are often the
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| basis for very expensive drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical firms. It is not a
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| 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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|
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| * Through misleading advertising and collusion with hospitals and medical
| | The evolution of these forms has been often slow, with periods of acceleration but also periods of recession. The example of the Arsenal of Venice, which in the early 16th century employed some 16,000 people and could produce almost a ship per day using production-lines, something not seen again after until the industrial revolution, illustrates how non-linear this evolution can be. |
| professionals, formula milk companies have managed to undermine mothers'
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| confidence in their own breast milk. This had led to a decline in breastfeeding in a
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| 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
| | The dynamic of that evolution depends on many factors. The evolution of technologies is one of them, but it is far from explaining everything, as the Venetian Arsenal example shows. Here the social consciousness, the social and political conflicts play a crucial role. The European wars of religion after the 16th century and the bourgeois revolutions where indirect or direct expressions of the conflict between the old feudal logic and the raising capitalistic one. |
| 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
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| have become so fixated on Western foods and diets that they overlook the great
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| variety of indigenous food sources, many of which simply grow untended like
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| weeds in their backyards. The monoculture mindset treats these food sources as
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| 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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|
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| * Organic products are scarce and expensive because a system biased towards
| | In the conflict you refer to about the management of Free/open software foundations, between "community-oriented" and "corporate-oriented" formats, we are witnessing the same kind of conflict between the old logic and the new. Its dynamic depends and will depend not only on material-technological realities but also on social and "political" struggles, at micro and macro scales. And things should become harsher when peer production will pretend to extend to the realm of material production. |
| chemicals imposes on organic producers the burden of proof: detailed record keeping,
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| testing, inspection, certification and labelling. What if producers of
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| chemically treated
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| crops and foods, not organic producers, were instead required
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| by law, in accordance with the “polluter pays” principle, to keep detailed
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| records of chemical treatments; get their products regularly inspected and tested by
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| accredited laboratories for minimum residue levels; undergo thirdparty
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| certification; and follow mandatory labelling requirements to identify which
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| chemicals and by what amounts their food products have been exposed to? If this
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| were so, the price tags of both organic and chemically treated
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| foods would change
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| dramatically in favor of organics.
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|
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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
| | You also wrote: |
| more than enough is available for everyone's need or even for everyone's capacity to
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| consume.
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| In nature, the tendency towards bountiful abundance is obvious, especially where
| | "This is inevitable, as no free software project can survive in the long run |
| seasonal variations highlight the contrast between abundance and scarcity. Prehistoric
| | without a core of developers being paid." |
| artefacts of fertility goddesses as well as harvest festivals and rituals still practiced today
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| 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
| | Yes. As long as the material means of production (and thus the material means of consumption) remain under the capitalist logic governance, the peer production realities will be in a way or another limited. |
| simply Life reasserting itself through the endless cycle of reproduction by every life form
| | (At a certain level, the problems to finance the 4th Oekonux Conference, or your personal difficulties to keep working the P2P Foundation while being obliged to work in order too feed your family are also materializations of that reality). |
| 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
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| gradually form a food web and settle into a dynamic balance, with closed material cycles
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| ensuring that the balance is maintained. This enables the processes of abundance to
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| continue indefinitely.
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| Sharing information does not diminish or deplete but rather multiplies and
| | The development of the present economic crisis should make more visible at a social scale the need to overcome the dominant logic. The "invisible hand" is paralyzing an increasing share of the material means of production while workers are made redundant and unsatisfied material needs explode. Let's hope that this evidence will help to develop the consciousness of the urgency to extend peer production principles to the material sphere. |
| enriches it. Shared information begets more information. The engine of information
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| 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
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| zeroes, with the right equipment and algorithm, an exact copy of the digital original or a
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| 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
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| 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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| 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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| 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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| Abundance helps to meet human needs and wants and should therefore be
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| welcomed.
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| What is the driving force behind antiabundance?
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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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| 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
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| 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
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| 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
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| 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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| 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
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| self interest in free competition with others. In fact, economists argue, the competitive
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| pursuit of individual gain accomplishes overall social goals better, even if this “was no
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| part of his intention,” than when individuals consciously try to advance society's higher
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| goals. This idea that individual pursuit of self interest
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| not only leads to but is actually the
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| 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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| 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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| Constructing a theory of abundance
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| Economics has always assumed a condition of scarcity and defined its role as the
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| 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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| 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
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| how society allocates its scare resources. Along the way to studying the implications of
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| 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.
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| Misunderstanding abundance as overproduction logically leads to counterproductive
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| measures restricting abundance, a misapplication of concepts developed under
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| assumptions of scarcity.
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| Yet, once we open our minds, we should see abundance all around us. Solar
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| energy has been with us from the beginning. So have clean air and water, plants and
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| animals, soil life, forests, and the astounding variety of life on Earth, now threatened.
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| Since the Internet emerged, we have also seen an extraordinary abundance of information
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| and knowledge and no lack of people willing to share them freely. Just look at the Web,
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| Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and all the lesser known but incredibly useful
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| efforts to make information and knowledge freely available on the Internet. New
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| technologies promise even more abundance: in bandwidth through fiber optics, in air time
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| through spread spectrum technology, and in storage through new media.
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| 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
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| to construct theories of abundance to complement the theories of scarcity that dominate | |
| economics today. In fact, economists who talk of “relative scarcity” only need a minor
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| leap of logic to recognize “relative abundance”. After all, a glass that is halfempty
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| is also
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| halffull.
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| Consider the variations in abundance. It can be precarious (collapse imminent),
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| temporary (lasting less than a lifetime), shortterm
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| (a few lifetimes), mediumterm
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| (many
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| lifetimes) or longterm
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| (longer than human existence). It can be relative (enjoyed by a
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| limited number), local (confined to a specific area) or absolute (accessible to all). The
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| abundance of solar energy and other energy forms associated with it, such as hydro, wind
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| and wave energy, is obviously longterm.
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| Solar energy is universal, while hydro, wind
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| and wave energy are more local. Coal's abundance is medium term,
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| if the estimates are
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| correct that the world's reserves may last for several hundred years more (i.e., many
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| human generations). Oil, which is perhaps good for another generation or two at current
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| extraction rates, is short term.
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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
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| resources. While absolute, universal abundance can have free/open access, others may
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| 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
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| imposed on threatened resources.
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| The ultimate goal of any management regime should be to ensure against any
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| 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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| 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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| “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
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| 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
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| 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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| 2. Make sure the resource will last for generations, preferably indefinitely.
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| This means turning limited, temporary or short term
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| abundance into long term
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| 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
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| needed for survival. At current rates of depletion, however, our generation has turned rain
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| forests into a short term
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| or temporary resource that will be gone in a few generations, if
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| not within our generation. Economists should be familiar with the difference between
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| income and capital, natural resource stocks and flows. In the rain forest case, ensuring
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| long term abundance means limiting the consumption of forest products to the natural
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| 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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| | |
| | |
| 3. Build a cascade of abundance.
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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
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| (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
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| applications like wikis and blogs, one abundance building on another. The sun is a
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| flexible energy source that can provide, through collectors and concentrators, a wide
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| range of temperatures to match various enduses.
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| | |
| By tapping it more, industry can
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| harness potentially huge amounts of energy for various productive activities, opening up
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| possibilities for creating abundance in many other sectors. Photovoltaic (PV) cells made
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| from silica, also an abundant resource, can transform sunlight into cheap electricity for
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| industrial, commercial and home use. This can make viable the electrolytic extraction
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| from water, another abundant resource, of hydrogen and oxygen. These can be stored and
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| later used in fuel cells, holding the promise of a pollution free
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| hydrogen based economy.
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| | |
| Most computer equipment, which are silicon based
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| like PV cells, have either been
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| halving in price or doubling in capacity every few years or so. LCD projectors now sell
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| for a fifth of their price ten years ago. If PV prices follow suit, perhaps due again to
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| China's entry, we can look forward to a cascade of solar based
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| abundance in the future.
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| Eventually we should be able to recognize conditions that lead to abundance and
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| then learn how to create more abundance. We alrady have a rough idea how abundance
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| happens in nature, in agriculture and in the information sector. We simply need to nurture
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| the forces that generate such abundance. One challenge is how to emulate ecological
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| processes such as the cyclic loops of nature to create a similar material abundance in the
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| industrial sector, without disrupting natural cycles
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| | |
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| 4. Develop an ethic that nurtures abundance.
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| To manage abundance well, its
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| community of beneficiaries must adopt a behavioral ruleset and the corresponding
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| enforcement mechanisms. It is desirable to eventually turn this ruleset into a mindset,
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| similar to Leopold's land ethic33 and Postel's water ethic, that makes the other goals of
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| social justice, sustainability, cascading abundance, and dynamic balance second nature to
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| all.
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| 5. Attain dynamic balance.
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| In a finite world, material abundance cannot grow
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| indefinitely. Nature shows us how abundance can occur indefinitely through a dynamic
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| balance (i.e., harmony) of abundant elements connected in closed material cycles. Citing
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| permaculture again as example, a similar balance can be attained in a farm by modelling
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| it after long lived self regenerating
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| ecological systems to design what are, in effect,
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| forests or ponds of food and cash crops. After we learn to design similar closed loops in
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| industry, we can bring this sector back into harmony with the rest of the living world.
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| | |
| Abundance creates commons
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| If we review history, and perhaps prehistory as well, we would see that abundance
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| has often led to the creation of commons. In communities that respond to abundance by
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| treating it as a common pool resource, community members tend to act cooperatively to
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| manage the commons so that the goals of social justice and sustainability are met and the
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| risk of failure in abundance is minimized.
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| | |
| Commons management involves not only economic rules but also cultural and
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| political factors such as conscious community decisions, appeals to the common good,
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| and the values of sharing, cooperation, altruism and community spirit. It often relies not
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| only on prices but also on restrictions, prohibitions and taboos. Ancient tribes and other
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| traditional societies have evolved complex social norms of behavior and hierarchies of
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| communal use and access rights that have served them well in managing abundance and
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| the commons for many generations. Similar norms have likewise evolved among
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| successful modern commons such as free/open source software and the Wikipedia.
| |
| | |
| Their institutions and methods for governing the commons have proved even more
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| useful for threatened resources as well as resources that have actually become scarce, by
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| helping meet goals of social justice and sustainability. In a number of instances, fishing
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| grounds and forest reserves have been nursed back to abundance, thanks to the proper
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| management of these commons.
| |
| | |
| | |
| **
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| Abundance as a field of study
| |
| | |
| Because abundance is clearly present in many aspects of human life, it is obviously an
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| interesting phenomenon and its study should logically be a major field of study. Yet, economics
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| practically denies abundance, defining itself as the study of efficient options in the context of scarcity.
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| Economists often say that when a good starts becoming abundant, it stops becoming interesting,
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| because the economic problem has been solved. If indeed, abundance is recognized as the solution to
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| the problem of scarcity, shouldn't it be studied even more? Shouldn't we learn the conditions that lead
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| to abundance, and the conditions that keep it going? Shouldn't we acquire the knowledge and skill to
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| generate abundance at will? Shouldn't we master the art and science of making one form of abundance
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| create another, and another, leading to a cascade of abundance?
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| Abundance is simply one end of a continuum that has scarcity at its other end. Obviously,
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| anything that is relatively scarce is, at the same time, relatively abundant. For completeness and by any
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| form of logic, the entire continuum should deserve our attention and study. We need a new economic
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| science that studies both scarcity and abundance.
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| In fact, many of the questions raised here go beyond the realm of economics. They need a
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| multi-disciplinary approach that includes expertise from the social, natural and physical sciences.
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| Indeed, the questions raised by a study of abundance are worthy scientific challenges.
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| Let us apply our new-found awareness and curiosity about abundance and make the first step
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| towards studying it.
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| Let us see how abundance may be classified..
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| Classifying abundance
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| Abundance may be classified in various ways, each way revealing additional facets about the
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| phenomenon and giving us hints about tapping it for the human good. For instance, abundance may be
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| classified according to:
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| Space.
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| Is it, like a waterfall, available to a few communities only? Local sources need local
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| management, where face-to-face interaction between acquaintances may ease the tension of resource
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| conflicts. In fact, many resources are actually local, though nation-states have appropriated these for
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| themselves and turned them into national patrimony. The Regalian doctrine that favor national over
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| local control of resources is, in many countries, vestige of their colonial past. The continuing debates
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| between local and national decision-making in the case of forests, dams and mine sites reflect this
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| ongoing tension between local and national management of sources of abundance. This conflict
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| becomes every more complicated with the entry of corporations, who range the globe for resources to
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| tap until these are depleted and move on. Some sources of abundance, like seas and great rivers, bring
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| benefits to more than one country, and therefore require even more delicate and sensitive negotiations.
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| Resource conflicts may erupt into wars, especially with resources which are being gradually depleted.
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| The truly global sources of abundance, like our atmosphere and the oceans, require complex
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| international management, as can be seen today in the climate change negotiations. Each of these types
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| need skill and knowledge not just in the scientific aspects of abundance but in a whole range of areas
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| that include political, economic, social, cultural and historical perspectives.
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| Negotiations between potential beneficiaries and other stakeholders involving spatially-limited
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| abundance can be highly unequal due to existing assymetric power relations. This is even truer in the
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| case of abundance that is spread over the time dimension, as explained below.
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| Time.
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| Is the abundance precarious? Precarious abundance is one whose collapse is imminent
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| and might be gone soon, and we had better do something about it quickly if we want to continue
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| enjoying its benefits. Is it temporary? This would refer to phenomena that last for less than a human
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| lifetime, perhaps a gold rush in some mountainside, or a discovery of a huge pile of guano in an
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| isolated island or cavern. Will it last for a few human lifetimes? Then it is a short-term abundance, like
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| oil is turning out to be. If it will last many lifetimes more, then it is a medium-term abundance, like,
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| possibly, coal. Forests, rivers, lakes, inland seas and other long-term sources of abundance should last
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| beyond human existence. But because of our own profligacy, ignorance or indifference, these long-term
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| resources have instead been turned into short-term resources that will be gone in a few generations.
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| This are huge challenges, which should be of interest to all. How do we stop a precarious resource from
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| imminent collapse? How do we turn a temporary abundance into a long-lasting one, that can serve not
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| only a few but many generations, if not every generation that is yet to come. The seventh generation
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| principle of native American Indians, it is said, reckoned decisions in terms of their effects up to the
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| seventh generation.
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| Shouldn't we, given the greater power of our technologies, look even farther into
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| the future?
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| Future generations cannot negotiate for themselves. Neither can plants and animals. Thus, some
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| humans must take up the cudgels for these voiceless stakeholders. Negotiating for access is hard
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| enough when a resource is abundant, how much more when it becomes scarce, and furthermore, one
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| has no voice? This situation demands not only the utmost of cross-species and cross-generation
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| empathy from us but also the deepest appreciation of the interconnectedness of generations and species.
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| Social sectors.
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| Certain types of abundance are accessible to all, other are accessible only to
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| those who have the wealth to exploit them. When the sun is up, poor and rich alike can enjoy the tan,
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| the warmth and the Vitamin D. Anyone can set up a solar water heater, a solar food cooker, or a
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| photovoltaic panel. But only corporate giants can access the oil and gas within the deep bowels of the
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| earth, and the process these into the various fuels they need. It should thus be obvious which abundant
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| energy source should receive the highest priority in terms of government research, subsidy and
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| preference.
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| Across species.
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| Appropriating the world's abundance exclusively for the human is a utilitarian
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| perspective that is increasingly under question. A less anthropocentric view concedes the right of other
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| species to exist, and therefore to survive. It further concedes other species the right to their own living
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| space, a concession that everyone must eventually make, if not for the sake of these species, then also
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| for the sake of future generations. This explicit concession is already enshrined in the design principles
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| of at least one farming system. Permaculture parcels every farm into several zones. Zone 5 is
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| wilderness, a cascade of abundance reserved for other species and not to be casually intruded upon
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| even by its so-called human owners, and then only as visitors.5 Reserved wilderness areas within the
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| permaculture farm allow us to witness, study and appreciate at close range how nature's abundance, left
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| to its own, plays itself out.
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| Elemental basis.
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| Pre-history has seen a stone-based as well iron-based eras featuring a specific
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| set of abundance that characterize them. Information abundance is silicon-based, dependent on
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| technological advances in semiconductors, of which silicon is one, together with the benefits of
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| digitalization, which made the reproduction of any number of identical copies over unlimited
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| generations a possibility. Ecological abundance is carbon-based. Carbon's natural affinity to hydrogen
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| and oxygen created organic substances that formed the basis of life and of reproductive processes.
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| These led to the great abundance in nature that is ultimately our very own basis for existence. The
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| abundance of solar energy is hydrogen-based. Hopefully, in the future, another hydrogen-based energy
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| economy, using hydrogen extracted from water to run fuel cells, can replace the unsustainable fossil
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| fuel-based energy economy we have today.
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