Editorial – Issue 03

‘Abundance’ is one of the most contested words of the moment. It is increasingly being used to challenge the scarcity logic inherent in conventional economics. But, depending on whom you read, the term bounces between ideologies that are often diametrically opposed. Most famously, it has been coopted by centrist liberals in the US as the key to unlocking growth. What has become loosely known as the ‘abundance agenda’ sees deregulation and mass investment in housing and infrastructure as the engines of not just a thriving economy but electability. This is the ‘more is more’ school of abundance.

There is another way of framing abundance that does not involve turning the Earth into a hyper-efficient production facility, but instead recognises the climate crisis and seeks to operate within natural planetary boundaries. According to this conception, we already have enough. We live in a world in which, as Vaclav Smil once pointed out, there are more species of mobile phone than there are of mammal. Our productivity is so prodigious that anthropogenic material now outweighs the natural biomass of the planet. We have a surfeit of certain things – waste, microplastics, concrete, fast fashion and cheap products that don’t last very long – and a shortage of others, like time and forms of freedom beyond endless consumer choice. We enjoy what Kai Heron describes in the issue’s conversation as ‘bullshit abundance’.

Do we really need more? Studying Lagos’s second-hand clothing markets, Tosin Oshinowo examines how recycling the global North’s fashion waste is shaping an alternative economy that may become Africa’s competitive advantage. Meanwhile, Dan Hill makes clear that even the UK’s vaunted housing crisis is not a classic supply-and-demand problem that can be solved by more building. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that, at the material level at least, circularity, reuse and repair ought to be a dominant ethos in design culture. You might call this, as Sharon Stein and her AI co-authors do in their essay, ‘composting abundance’.

Material abundance, however, is only one facet. Running through this issue are two other notions of abundance that are equally important. One is the life-giving natural bounty of this miraculous planet. Industrialised plantations and nature-depleting monocultures may have been byproducts of growing populations, but they were also driven by a Malthusian impulse to privatise the commons. The antidote to such logics is to prioritise biodiversity and regenerative land use – to cultivate in ways that encourage natural abundance rather than diminish it. The other factor is human energy and potential, which abound in communities both small and large, yet are so often left out of discussions of abundance. Empowerment and mutuality go hand in hand with the care of material resources and the living world.

Abundance may be the slogan du jour of the ‘build build build’ brigade, but this is merely to abuse a seductive word. One could move on and relinquish the terminology to them, but it feels important to argue that abundance is not just about more; it is about recognising what we already have. It is about enough. As an idea and as a counter-narrative, it carries an immanent environmental ethic and a sense of optimism that make it worth reclaiming.

Justin McGuirk