Assumption 4: Scarcity or Abundance, version 2

Most people have grandparents who lived through the Great Depression of the 30s in the US. Those were hard times. There was no work, stocks became worthless, and banks were useless. Everybody was broke. People lined up at soup lines. After the economy finally recovered, especially after World War II, those people who had lived through the Depression still worried about losing their jobs, losing their money, losing their security.

Many carried the expectation of scarcity within them; they saved their money, and were careful about expenditures. It was the next generation who drove the post-war economic boom years, in the 50s and 60s. Two generations were in the same economy, but their perceptions and behavior were different--the first was oriented to scarcity, the second to abundance. Many folks in the Depression generation were so scared--or scarred--from that experience that they continued to be frugal and to worry about their expenditures for the rest of their lives.

I was a grad student at UCLA during the Kennedy administration when the US military discovered Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba. The President gave the Soviets an ultimatum: get the missiles out, or expect a nuclear attack from the US. Everybody I knew was extremely concerned about what was going to happen. One of the most tangible behaviors I became aware of was that people hoarded food. Shelves on supermarkets were nearly bare. One couldn't find bags of sugar or other staples anywhere. Everyone expected a military catastrophe, which would create scarcity, so they hoarded basic foods, and created what everyone feared: scarcity.

It was also during the 60s that the hippy generation began exploring new ways of perceiving the world, and new ways of traveling through it. The limits of perception and awareness were pushed back through music, psychedelics, and communal living. This social exploration and creative innovation floated on the exuberance of a growing economy. The context of abundance encouraged a turn toward relaxed social strictures and an abhorrence of conflict. Make love, not war.

Today, as the price of food and the fuel to transport it are increasing, there is a growing experience of scarcity again. The world is running out of oil. Solar and wind energy are not yet online, and nuclear energy comes with the one troubling problem: there's no good way to throw out or store the deadly nuclear waste.

What we do have is a growing abundance of human beings on the planet. We do all need to eat, drink, stay warm or cool as needed, and get from here to there using mostly petroleum-based transportation. And together we're pumping more and more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, changing our world's climate and melting our polar ice caps. We're accelerating down a road that leads to a brick wall.

But more and more of us are paying attention to this emerging problem, and are using our individual and social creativity to find ways to deal with it and to put those solutions in place. The Web site for Wiser Earth lists links to 108,647 organizations that are currently working toward the interdependent goals of social justice and ecological wellbeing. We are tapping into what is most abundant in the world--human creativity and good will toward fellow human beings and toward all living beings on the planet.

As we do, we are discovering an emerging global consciousness, beyond our collective individual consciousness; one that has the abundant energy, creativity, and commitment to bring back sanity to our world and to maintain the one life-boat we're all in--or as Buckminster Fuller called it, our Spaceship Earth.