Roberto VERZOLA

Abstract: Technology and law are increasingly used to undermine processes of abundance intrinsic to nature, agriculture and the information sector. A number of examples are reviewed here; the relationship between such counter-productive use of technology and law and corporate profit-seeking is revealed; the phenomenon of abundance is linked with the related concepts of scarcity and commons, and an approach is proposed that harnesses abundance for the human good.

Roberto Verzola is a convenor and member of the Philippine Greens. He is active in information, environmental and agriculture issues. He may be reached at rverzola@gn.apc.org.

1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

2 Kira Gould and Lance Hosey, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design (Ecotone Publishing, 2007), p.20.

3 Francis Chaboussou, Healthy Crops: A New Agricultural Revolution (Charlbury, UK: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2004).

4 A Philippine-based Rockefeller-funded research center on rice breeding. See http://www.irri.org. For a comprehensive critique of the IRRI approach, see Nicanor Perlas and Renee Velvee, Oryza Nirvana? (Quezon City: Southeast Asian Regional Institute for Community Education, 1997).

5 For s critique of the Green Revolution, see Andrew Pearse, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. See also Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991).

6 Mark Mikel and John Dudley, “Evolution of North American Dent Corn from Public to Proprietary Germplasm,” in Crop Science 46:1193-1205 (2006). See http://crop.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/46/3/1193.

7 See for instance: Wayne Wenzel, “Syngenta buys Garst” (May 12, 2004) http://farmindustrynews.com/news/Syngenta-buys-Garst/

8 Matthew Dillon, “Monsanto buys Seminis”, Organic Broadcaster (Mar.-Arp. 2005) http://www.newfarm.org/features/2005/0205/seminisbuy/index.shtml

9 Carrey Gillam, “Monsanto to Buy Vegetable Seed Company” (April 1, 2008) http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47728/story.htm

10 See The Crucible Group, People, Plants and Patents: The Impact of Intellectual Property on Trade, Plant biodiversity, and Rural Society, (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1994.)

11 “Top Awards for Scientist Who Developed the First Transgenic Plant”, Pesticide Outlook June 2002.

12 See for instance U.S. patents 4900676, 4970168, 5276268, 5312912, 5382429, 5503999, 5498533, 5633434, 5648249, 6043409, 6130368, 6204436, 6495745, 6646184, 6791009, and 7314973

13 This term comes from Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (A Declaration of Sustainability), (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

14 E. Anne Clark, “So, Who Really Won the Schmeiser Decision?” Crop Choice 13 June 2004, http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2004/Schmeiser-Who-Won13jun04.htm.

15 A thourough discussion can be found in Vandana Shiva, Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, (London: Zed Books, 2001).

16 Food Research and Action Center, “Hunger in the U.S.”, http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html

17 A small device plugged into a computer that enables an application program to run.

18 See a fuller discussion of these arguments in Roberto Verzola, Towards a Political Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy (Quezon City: Constantino Foundation). See also http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/infoeconomy-verzola.pdf.

19 See Philippine Greens, “Philippine Greens protest the visit of #1 U.S. cyberlord Bill Gates” March 20, 1998, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/29/048.html.

20 For a fuller discussion, see Alan Story, Colin Darch and Debora Halbert (eds.), The Copy/South Dossier: Issues in the Economics, Politics and Ideology of Copyright in the Global South (Kent: University of Kent, 2006), http://www.copysouth.org/. See also Pradip Ninan Thomas and Jan Servaes (eds.), Intellectual Property Rights and Communications in Asia: Conflicting Traditions (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006).

21 Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews, eds., Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age, (Washington D.C.: Cato Institute, 2002).

22 See for instance Tiahan Xue, “Exploring Chinese Herbal Medicine Can Foster Discovery Of Better Drugs”, The Scientist 10(4):9, February 19, 1996.

23 Simon Montlake, “Milk Formula Goes on Trial in Asia”, Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 2007. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0622/p05s01-woap.html

24 For an English version, see http://rverzola.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/bahay-kubo-english-translation/.

25 Steve Buckley, “Community Radio and Empowerment”, May 1, 2006. http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/22022/11472542151Steve_Buckley.doc/...

26 See Ray Reece, The Sun Betrayed (Boston: Southend Press, 1979). See also Daniel Berman and John O'Connor, “Who Owns the Sun?” (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1997).

27 For a full discussion, see James Boyle, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996.

28 David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford: Kumarian Press, 1996).

29 How this happens in the information economy is discussed in Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? New York: The New Press, 2002.) See also Verzola, “Cyberlords: rentier class of the information sector” in Towards a Political Economy, p. 145-161.

30 Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Economics 14th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1992), p.2.

31 Peter Rosset, Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture. Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy. September 1999. For a comprehensive discussion of the sustainable agriculture approach for small farms, see P.G. Fernandez, A.L. Aquino, LE.P. de Guzman and M.F.O. Mercado (eds.), Local Seed Systems for Genetic Conservation and Sustainable Agriculture Handbook (Los Banos, Laguna: University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, 2002).

32 Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is a system of designing farms that minimizes non-renewable energy requirements, ensures the continuous cycling of biomass, fills as many ecological niches as possible with food and cash crops, and provides for a wilderness area within the farm. See Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual (Hyderabad: The Deccan Development Society, 1990).

33 Briefly, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” See Also Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966).

34 An ethic to “make the protection of water ecosystems a central goal in all that we do.” See Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

35 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). See also Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).

36 Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Programming firms with these robotic laws would have made corporations easier to control.

37 For a fuller discussion, see Verzola, Towards a Political, p. 170-190.

38 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Science 162 (1968).

39 Elinor Ostrom, Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolšak, Paul Stern, Susan Stonich and Elke Weber (eds.), The Drama of the Commons (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002). See also Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990).

The following table shows how a focus on abundance creates a mindset that is orthogonal to one that focuses on scarcity:

The three major sectors of the economy - the agriculture, industrial and information sectors - present us with a complex mix of markets and commons of scarce and abundant goods. We need to tap into the vast pool of historical as well as current insight, knowledge and experience to develop a modern theory of political economy that can cope with both abundance and scarcity.

Thus, a rich heritage of theory and practice in managing abundance and coping with scarcity exists and may be found in the literature of the commons. This heritage was overlooked for several decades after Hardin observed in 1968 that a “tragedy of the commons” ensued when rational gain-maximizers exploited the commons in pure pursuit of self-interest.38 This has led governments to take over these commons as State property or turn them over to corporate interests through privatization, oftentimes creating worse tragedies. What can be worse than the tragedy which befell Russia, when the common wealth of its people - literally the product of their sweat, tears and blood - became private property overnight of Party bureaucrats-turned-capitalists? Subsequent studies have since shown that Hardin's “tragedy” was by no means universal, and that successful practices in managing the commons continue to serve many communities today.39

Hardin's analysis of his herders and pasture example was also too simplistic. Hardin argued that a rational herder would gain for himself +1 unit per additional head, and split with other herders the -1 unit damage to the pasture. He concluded that the positive net gain will drive every herder to keep adding heads to the pasture until the commons collapses. Hardin's risk-blind herder does not take into account the risk to his own perpetual income stream created by each additional head he puts to pasture. A risk-wise herder, weighing the gain from each additional head against the increasing risk of losing his perpetual income stream, will stop adding heads before the probability of losing that income stream reaches 100%, which occurs as carrying capacity is exceeded.

Every herder will get a clear signal as the risk increases, because he will be getting less gain per unit effort as the pasture deteriorates. Here is a self-regulating system that requires no unrealistic assumptions like perfect knowledge or perfect competition.

A foolhardy herder who needs the +1 gain badly enough may still risk not only his own but also everyone else's perpetual income stream. Since each one could, one day, face a similar situation of urgent need, they may eventually realize that it would be better for each herder to contribute a small amount to raise the +1. This suggests, as a long-term solution, a system of insurance or social security, a type of commons that reduces individual risk by pooling resources.

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.

Corporations maximize their gain (i.e., profits) through efficiency and scale. Another concept, however, could be more important than efficiency. This is the concept of reliability, the quality of “being available when needed”, of “lasting for a long time”. This common concept may further clarify how the two goals of social justice and sustainability can be met.

When abundance fails and becomes unavailable to some sectors of society, or to subsequent generations, this failure is a loss of reliability. Reliability is measured in terms of “mean time before failure” (or “mean time between failures”). Improving reliability means reducing the risk of failure. A more familiar formulation is the “precautionary principle”.

To prevent abundance from turning into scarcity, maximizing gain (efficiency) should give way to minimizing risks (reliability) from threats to the sources of abundance. This suggests a “risk-averse” strategy, which precisely is a strategy common among ancient tribes and traditional societies. Perhaps, they instinctively recognized that their goal was to preserve the natural abundance which sustained them and to minimize any risk that may cause such abundance to end.37

Under conditions of abundance, the ideal economic agent is not the gain-maximizer competing for self-interest and incidentally making markets efficient, but the risk-minimizer cooperating with others to intentionally make their common resources more reliable.

Often, a resource that a community considers optimally used because the risk of failure has been minimized will appear under-utilized to a corporation because gain is not being maximized. This is probably the cause of resource conflicts in many areas, especially where corporations intrude into community resources.

To get optimum yield, gain-maximizers keep increasing production towards the “carrying capacity” of the resource. However, imperfect knowledge, uncertainties and lags inherent in natural systems can lead to oscillatory behavior and overshoots. Exceeding carrying capacity, even temporarily, can trigger a major mindset shift that can lead to a race that ends up in a breakdown of the commons.

Guided by the precautionary principle, risk-minimizers focus not on carrying capacity but on the impact of extraction on the resource. Individuals evaluate the negative impact as risk to their perpetual source of abundance - risk being the probability of failure times the present value of their income stream that would be lost - and weigh this against their own need. This self-regulating mechanism, where individuals limit their gain as they minimize the risk of losing a perpetual source of abundance, can keep the system in equilibrium. Even pure self-interest should drive them to cooperate with others to make sure the rate of extraction stayed well below the carrying capacity, which represents a near-100% risk of failure. Should dire need push one to extract beyond acceptable risk, he will have to contend with the wrath of others whose perpetual income stream he is putting to risk. Or perhaps they will cooperatively chip in to help meet a member's dire need, given their common interest to protect the resource that gives each of them a perpetual income stream.

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 abundance figure in the definition or goals of economics.

Practically all economic textbooks are premised on scarcity. Check their index: “scarcity” would be found in the early pages - the first chapter, probably; “abundance” would be missing, creating a blind spot among economists. Samuelson and Nordhaus 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 might refer to “overproduction”, suggesting an anomaly to be avoided or corrected. Misunderstanding abundance as overproduction logically leads to counter-productive measures restricting abundance, a misapplication of concepts developed under assumptions of scarcity.

Yet, once we open our minds, we should see abundance all around us. Solar energy has been with us for billions of years. 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 equally heroic and 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 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 economics today. In fact, economists who acknowledge “relative scarcity” only need a minor leap of logic to acknowledge “relative abundance”. After all, a glass that is half-empty is also half-full.

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 long-term. 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. In addition, fossil fuel abundance is relative because it is 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 outsiders. Extraction rates may need to be regulated. Moratoriums may even have to be imposed on threatened resources.

The ultimate goal of any management regime should be to ensure against any failure of abundance. The following specific goals are suggested:

1. Make the resource accessible to a greater number of people - ideally, to all. This is merely a restatement of the goal of social justice. Potable water, for instance, is so important to human survival that this goal should be paramount for this resource, abundant or not. For water - and for land, as well - Gandhi's observation rings true: “There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.” These 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 own a home lot because the ownership structure allows a few to own thousands of 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 family-size farms can be as productive and efficient, if not more, than huge, corporate-held tracts.31

2. Make sure the resource will last for generations, preferably indefinitely. 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 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 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. Strategies for managing non-renewable resources, or information resources, would of course be different.

3. Build a cascade of abundance. Abundance in one sector (or of one good) can help create abundance in another sector (or of another good). The food chain is a good 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 linkages among farm components, permaculture32 teaches how one type of abundance can be made to support another through conscious design. A similar cascade occurs on the 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 end-uses. 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.

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

4. Develop an ethic that nurtures abundance. 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 ethic34, 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.

At least four major sources of imbalance threaten our world today:

a) The current reliance on a non-renewable energy base. Although the size of the world's fossil fuel stock may be debatable, it rate of exploitation will sooner or later surely fail to keep up with rising demand, causing major economic disruptions.

b) The linear production processes of the industrial sector. The industrial sector uses raw materials from nature and agriculture and turns them into finished products. Whether these goods are durable, reusable or disposable, they are eventually thrown away as waste. Unlike the closed cycles of nature, this is a linear process that consumes biomass, dead matter and energy at the input end and produces synthetic, often non-biodegradable and even toxic goods and wastes at the output end. This one-way transformation constantly disrupts the dynamic balance and closed loops of the natural world. Eventually, the finished goods reach the end of their useful life -quickly, if they are disposable or one-time use goods - and become wastes too. If these wastes enter the body of any living organism, including humans, they can seriously disrupt its health. In effect, fuelled by an ideology of accumulation - industry is turning the natural world into a synthetic - and ultimately, unliveable - one. The solution, as Barry Commoner proposed35, is to turn linear industrial processes into closed material loops and recycle all industrial wastes as well as goods that have reached the end of their useful life back into the production process.

c) The unchecked growth of human population. For every biological form on Earth except the human, at least one more life form exists - feeder, predator or parasite - that limits the former's population and keeps it in balance with the rest of the living world. This food chain creates an energy pyramid that is wide at its base, where plants directly tap solar energy, and becomes narrower towards the top, as we go from herbivores and to predators. There is one exception. the human population at the apex of this biological food chain has grown disproportionately larger than the rest of the pyramid, appropriating for itself much of the Earth's livable habitat as well as production of energy and biomass. With no natural enemies to effectively limit our population, we have to discover other means to do so. (Perhaps the global drop in sperm counts is nature's own response?) Because it involves the fundamental biological urge to reproduce one's kind, the issues are complex and the debates rage on. But solutions we must find.

d) The unlimited corporate drive for profit. The business firm is programmed to maximize its return on investment, no more, no less. This simplistic programming as a profit-seeker driven purely by self-interest has made it better adapted than the human to the world of markets, competition and capital accumulation which economists have defined the world to be. Being better adapted, corporations have become the dominant economic player in our world. Because, under our legal systems, corporations are legal persons distinct from their board of directors and shareholders, corporations have now acquired a life of their own. They can feed themselves, regenerate, reproduce, make plans in pursuit of their internal urge, and hire people to execute these plans. Using their superior economic power, they have also acquired political power and taken over media and education. They have become so well-entrenched and their accumulated economic, political and cultural powers so extensive that if they were counted as a distinct man-made species, they would now be considered the dominant species on this planet, having managed to domesticate the great Homo sapiens itself. As corporations relentlessly pursue their internal programming, seeking profits without limit, they are causing huge global imbalances that threaten the survival not only of human societies but of many other species as well. Displacing these runaway automatons from their dominant status and reprogramming them with more benign goals (Asimov's laws of robotics36, for instance) has become the greatest challenge of our era.

The driving forces behind abundance in the agriculture and information sectors have been identified. In agriculture, it is the inherent urge in every life form to reproduce its own kind, fuelled by the practically limitless energy from the sun. In the information sector, it is the inherent urge in every human being to communicate with others, share knowledge and information with them, and produce knowledge together, given full expression by the near-zero cost of sharing made possible with digital electronic technology.

Abundance helps to meet human needs and wants and should therefore be welcomed. What is the driving force behind anti-abundance?

The answer should be clear by now. Attacks against abundance have been mostly initiated by business firms or by governments. Where governments undertook these measures, they have done so at the instance of some business firms, which in the final analysis reaped the benefits of the government measures.

Looking more closely at the logic of business firms, it is obvious that the 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 change little or not at all and prices go up, then profits go up. This is the logic behind 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 maximizing profits. Indeed, they may maximize profits, but not necessarily be the best way to encourage creativity. Free/open source software and farmer-bred varieties show that creativity can continue to flourish even without the attraction of monopoly earnings.

Shouldn't this selfish end give way to higher societal goals? The economist's 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 not only leads to but is actually the best path towards overall social good became the moral basis for capitalist society. This was the programmed into business firms as an “urge” to maximize gain, and they do so by controlling abundance and scarcity in their favor. This is the driving force behind anti-abundance.

Because human beings were a complex bundle of urges, emotions and motivations who often acted irrationally (i.e., regardless of self-interest) from an economist's perpective, corporations became the ideal economic agents, pursuing nothing but maximum gain for themselves based on the economic theory of laissez faire capitalism.28 They are therefore driven to undermine abundance and create artificial scarcity as an unintended but logical consequence of their internal programming, creating a modern class of rentiers who accumulate wealth by charging fees for access to the resources they control.29

It is clear from the preceding examples that technology and law, separately or in various combinations, are being intentionally used counter-productively by businesses and governments to undermine abundance and create artificial scarcity. These counter-productive approaches may be summarized as follows:

The technological approach. A good example are the copy-protection measures taken by software developers to make it difficult for users to copy disks and similar media. These technological approaches include not only copy-protection but also copy-restriction, copy-identification, and user-restriction. An example in agriculture is the Terminator Technology. This approach is often combined with a legal approach.

The subsidy approach. Another approach similarly uses digital/genetic use restriction technologies (DURTs/GURTs) to prevent copying and reproduction, but goes further. These technologies are also actively promoted by the government while low-cost credit, subsidies and other forms of support are withdrawn from competing technologies. This is the case in the promotion of HYVs, hybrids and engineered seeds at the expense of traditional and heirloom varieties, and the replacement of work animals with mechanized equipment.

The technology protection approach. Still another combination approach uses laws to protect technological copy-protection from being bypassed or to mandate its use. The former is the case with DRM technologies, which U.S. law now protects from being bypassed or disabled.

The purely legal approach. Outright bans illustrate a purely legalistic approach. The enforcement of patents, copyrights and plant variety protection bans simple copying, seed sales and seed exchange. Other bans: uncertified seeds; low-power broadcasting; unlicensed practitioners of healing. Bans may not be so benign: in the Middle Ages, women healers were burned at the stake.

The most devastating approach of all has been the poisoned pill strategy of introducing an anti-abundance technology that appears to deliver a good or service but in fact destroys a resource that it intends to replace. For example: agrochemical industry destroyed the natural fertility of the soil and devastated populations of natural pest control organisms; the genetic engineering industry is undermining organic farming through genetic contamination; engineered corn is hastening Bt resistance that will make the natural Bt biopesticide useless; formula milk slows down and eventually stops the mothers' production of breast milk for their babies.

If it cannot be controlled, then the abundant resource, like the sun, is simply ignored as much as possible.

Creating abundance is a matter of reproducing a good over and over again, until more than enough is available for everyone's need or even for everyone's capacity to consume.

In nature, the tendency towards bountiful abundance is obvious, especially where seasonal variations in insolation 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.

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 process is self-limiting 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 continue indefinitely.

Sharing information does not diminish or deplete but rather multiplies and enriches it. Shared information begets more information. The engine of information abundance is the inherent human desire to communicate, to seek information and knowledge, and to share them, an urge that gets more fully expressed as the cost of sharing goes down. 27The cost of reproducing electronic signals is now approaching zero. With digital technology, books, artworks, music and video can now be stored in the same 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 available in easily searchable form on the Internet, an unlimited number of users may now get any number of exact copies of the work. Who cannot recognize the abundance of human knowledge, experience and creative work made possible by the Internet? As more and more people discover its possibilities for sharing freely, the whole range of human skills, thought and feeling is now being made available through this medium.

From an information perspective, abundance in nature and in agriculture is, in a way, driven by the inherent program within genetic information to reproduce itself. This abundance, however, must eventually express itself in terms of biomass and is therefore constrained by material limits. Information abundance, on the other hand, is of the non-material variety. Thus information goods offer the promise of practically unlimited abundance, constrained mainly by the limits of human creativity, the storage capacity of media, and the availability of electricity to power servers on the Internet twenty-four hours a day.