Scarcity and Abundance
October 6, 2026
We are camped near a hot spring in the Eastern Sierra. This is one of my favorite places. Hot water rises up from the earth. It emerges as a spring on a hillside and cascades down to a clear, cold Sierra stream fed by snow. A dome of travertine has built up under the cascade so that the falling water braids into several streams that drip, trickle, or pour into the stream. A series of pools constructed with river cobbles along the edge of the stream hold the hot water.
This morning I rose at dark and walked the trail under the half moon to the hot spring. I walked carefully across the stream to get to the hot pools. The water was cold on my feet and shins in the brisk morning. I was careful not to step on barely wet rocks - the ice from the cold night would make them slippery! Then I was there at the hot spring and floated in the hot water below the cascade of hot water from above.
Hot springs are a gift of the earth. So comforting to be immersed in this water heated far below. It is a joyful miracle to be experienced. Like a rainbow or a sunset. These wonders occur, but we need to be there to make them miraculous by experiencing them.
This morning I feel like I am fulfilling that role.
Below the hard surface, the earth is hot and molten. We exist on this thin cooled crust under a even thinner and fragile atmosphere. The heat within the earth is residual from its formation - but also generated from the nuclear decay of various elements within. Water finds places to seep and flow deep enough that it is heated from the earth and rises again to the surface. I am soaking in the heat of the Earth.
Soaking in this abundant warm water, it feels strange to think of the global scarcity of energy. Energy is what drives our industrial and global economy. When it is abundant, transportation, manufacturing - even today’s compute - is cheap. When it is scarce, these things are expensive. Wars and fortunes are made due to scarce energy.
Now, just rising above, is the fiery sun with unfathomable amounts of energy. Not far below my feet is also a seemingly endless supply of heat.
And I am trapped right between. Enjoying the heat from the Earth in my spring and watching the warming dawn as the sun rises.
If we could only better capture these sources and store them. We can enjoy them - the sun warming my skin, the hot pool I am soaking in - but they escape our capture to power our current industrial endeavors.
Currently, we mostly depend on ancient biology to capture and store the energy that powers our entire global economy. We think ourselves advanced technologists! But in the end, we just dig up the hydrocarbons assembled by plants millions of years ago as the #1 energy capture and storage technology.
Photosynthesis evolved within living things to take CO2 from the atmosphere, and light energy from the sun, and build complex molecules that store that energy in their bonds. Meanwhile, releasing oxygen. Photosynthetic organisms figured out how to build themselves with just sunlight and CO2. But trees and plants aren’t just building hydrocarbons to get by - they are in fierce competition for a scarce energy resource. The successful plants built hydrocarbons out of thin air and sunlight to construct their trunks, stems, branches, and leaves so they can capture more energy from the sun than their neighbors, and cast shadows on their competitors.
It is the scarcity of energy from the sun that drives the evolutionary process of plants competing for sunlight. That fierce competition over hundreds of millions of years left us with vast reserves of energy in hydrocarbons to be mined in the Earth.
Our global economy and data centers are using the spoils of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary war when we burn fossil hydrocarbons.
We rely on BIOLOGY as our TECHNOLOGY. And we benefit from the fierce competition all of those organisms had in their struggle for the scarce energy they could get from the sun. And with the power we generate? A paradox - even though the technology, global economy and lifestyle we have built with this energy is remarkable, we seem to just create more scarcity. It is a miracle that the avocado I ate was brought to me from across the world on the power of photosynthesis from 100 million year old fossil plants. But the vast majority of the world doesn’t enjoy that abundance. And even I am left wondering if there isn’t a better avocado I could find somewhere.
Is everything just a struggle against scarcity? The economist Keynes thought our very being is about a struggle with scarcity.
Keynes wondered what would happen if there was no more scarcity and everyone had what they wanted. Catastrophe he thought.
But here I am soaking in a hot spring with no concern for scarcity and no anxiety. Basking in a limitless abundance of energy.
This heat energy in the hotspring is not scarce. It is not the product of biology struggling against itself to get the most sun. Maybe that is why I come to this source of heat for an energy that isn’t a manifestation of scarcity - and perhaps that is why it is so calming.
Maybe we need to look for more things in life that are not born of scarcity but born of abundance.
Maybe actions powered by abundance are more true than the actions born of scarcity.
Maybe too, the perception of scarcity is mostly manufactured by the people who benefit from inspiring legions of people with scarcity and fear it when actually the abundance is right beneath our feet.