Abundance & Scarcity

In the culture of death built upon the ancient teachings of dissent and embodied in the modern platform of deep ecology, it is a world of scarcity, and the biggest problem is too many humans.

In the culture of life, built upon the ancient teachings of the Catholic Church, it is a world of abundance, and the biggest problem is a lack of vision.

In the seminal 1982 book by Rodger Charles, S.J. & Drostan Maclaren, O.P. The Social Teaching of Vatican II: Its Origin and Development, the human capacity of our planet is noted:

"…the evidence is that sufficient food and resources are available (and will continue to be available in the future if past experience, the only rational basis for prediction, is anything to go by) to meet the needs of increase in the world’s population in the foreseeable future. This being so, the present concern with controlling population by practically any means can only be regarded as a panic reaction. Already the wilder predictions of doomsters have been proved wrong. Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970’s. Disaster on that scale did not take place—and starvation where it occurs is usually a result of human mismanagement. So far from being incapable of supporting present and future population, a responsible official of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations has reckoned that the world’s resources would enable food production to be increased by a factor of 50 over the next century if proper steps were taken. This figure exceeds Colin Clark’s estimation that the world’s potential agricultural and forest land could supply 47 billion at American and 157 billion at Asian standards. [in his book Population Growth and Land Use (London, 1977, p.153]” (Rodger & Maclaren, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, pp.346-347)