In the begging, Part II, page 2

a reply to: ericblair4891

I understand abundance very well.

I know that it is a myth. There is no abundance of fish now, because we have polluted and over fished our seas. With radioactive waste from nuclear plants, with badly managed oil exploration and exploitation, with incorrectly disposed of plastics, chemical components in our hair products and skin lotions, our body wash and other things besides, all washed out into the sea, where tiny pieces of plastic in the mixture do not dissolve, but end up inside the breathing apparatus of fish, choking them to death slowly.

I know that all the abundance we have ever seen on this planet, we have seen only because we do not think deeply enough, do not consider the deep long term. When most folk look at an empty lot in a city, perhaps they see a business, or a high rise residence, maybe even a cost of construction, and a potential rate of return on investment. I do not. I see the way that the high rise residence may affect local businesses, I see the way a new commercial building might affect land lords and residents in the area. I see how these things might develop over a hundred years, and I see how the increased load of heat, light, and fuel use that building will necessitate, affects the air, the land, the seas...

There is no abundance, save for in these two respects.

Contrary to popular opinion, there is LOTS of space for more people, everywhere. Spaced out evenly, every person on the Earth could have a massive patch of land compared to that which many of us are used to living on. Also, there are massive, virtually untapped reserves of solar and wind energy, neither of which our governments make an awful lot of use of, relative to how much they ought to. Make no mistake, every resource which is not renewable is not abundant, because when we hear abundance, we go overboard and make species extinct, destabilise the ground under our feet by sucking out its guts, we fracture rocks to release gases, and in doing so poison our land and our air with radioactive, heavy metal laden muck from the depths of the ground...

We are not capable of operating an abundance rationally, because we are incapable of restraint.

Abundance of the sort you are talking about was never sustainable.