Abundantism and a Green Future

Becoming awake and aware of abundance

Your life is flooded daily with abundant images of fires and floods.

It all begins to feel to be too much.

Yet, abundance is nature’s way. Her primary tool is to make too much of a thing, or a set of systems, and see what bears fruit.

A fir cone has about 100 seeds per cone, but also about 1,000 cones per tree.

A frog can lay over 50,000 eggs at a time.

There are an estimated 60,000 kinds of plants in the Amazon.

And, yet, somehow many of these are endangered by another abundance.

We took an over-abundance of sunlight stored in fossil fuels and began to burn them in great abundance. This has led to an imbalance.

It is not the case that there is too much water, or even too much fire, in the world. It is that we have overheated the world with our bad habits, and we have upset the natural and geologic pace of climate change.

Abundance isnt the problem

The problem is a failure (so far) to harness the abundant tendencies of nature to create renewables, improve agriculture, distribute opportunity, justice and therefore, wealth, more evenly.

Abundantism is a recognition of this.

Human creativity, as outlined in this article on abudnant ecosystems, by Desiree Driesenaar, is another infintitley renewable resource. We must tap into it with enormous enthusiasm.

There are countless ways to optimize resources, eliminate waste, and fuel eoconomies of the world. We just need to see more, not less and limited, opportunity.

Diversity, particularly biodiversity is another way to create abundance that we can borrow from nature’s wisdom. We currently have narrowed our primary food products down to rice, corn, soy, and wheat as staples.

However, if we plant a wider variety, practice agroforestry, provide for pollinators and keep as many seeds in circulation as possible, we ensure more biodiversity and so, more life, on Earth.

Another piece of this kind of abundantism is cultural. Keeping cultural customs alive, and celebrating human diversity is an extremely vital part of the movement to create abundant equality worldwide.

Exploiting abundance

Exploitation is the exact opposite of abundance. When humans go in search of conquest and subjugation of peoples or place, they hoard. They don’t need to recognize the wider advantages of abundance if concentrated wealth and exploitation of specific resources is an option.

For example, if you can enslave people to harvest cotton or tabacco, or sieze their mineral rights to mine oil, gas, or gold, (or antyhing) then all other resources can fall away from their natural use and proliferation.

As is overly obvious, we have a huge addiction to greenhouse gas emitting resources, and we need to examine many, many other options both for generating energy, but also for the prosperity they can provide.

Many of these too, although abundant, must be balanced according to region and reliability.

The issues and injustices of extreme capitalism, empire, and hoarding of resources, notably fossil fuels, has led to a great many disasters intersecting at one particular time in history.

It has also led to prosperity for some and for a short time, abundance of food and energy. The true cost of that is only now being realized and hopefully reckoned with as we move toward infinite, rather than concentrated, abudnance.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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