The world in which humans lived several thousand years ago looked little like what we see today, though perhaps more similar than we may initially think. The hunter-gatherers were forced to live in day-to-day mode, rarely assured of the next day’s sustenance or survival. With limited capability to control their surrounding environment, their well being depended on the whims of the seasons, how much yield would the wild trees and bushes provide in a given ecosystem in a particular year, what that year’s climate would do to reproduce migratory patterns in animals of prey, and what pathogens would flourish in those wild plants and animals, waiting to attack the naïve human host. As one may expect, the lifespan of the early human reflected the hostility encountered in the surrounding world, with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon on average living barely to 30 years (though ancient Romans didn’t do much better than this, making it into their early 30s).
After several hundreds of thousands of years, the hunter-gatherer era paved the way to domestication, harvesting both plants and animals for food in controlled environments. They must have begun to experience at this time a rudimentary idea of surplus. There is evidence of caves used as storage units for harvested grains. While still living in a notoriously uncertain world, humans realized they could exert force into this world to increase the likelihood of creating stability and predictability into their lives with the use of newly developed ideas and technology.
We see in our own period that, over time, technological development and familiarity yield progress. There is always a new updated gadget around the corner to replace what we currently have, though today this happens at a much faster pace than in yesteryear. Through trial and error, with time the ability to produce desirable crops and herds got more efficient and produced a better yield.
God’s expectation for humanity is to thrive, not merely survive by scrounging by on a daily basis. We are told to prosper in our environment, knowing that in the Garden there is more than enough sustenance for all of Creation. Does this not seem as the antithesis of how we see our world? A place of limited resources where we all fight for “what’s rightfully ours”, playing the zero-sum game of the finite? If my tribe is to survive (i.e. family, race, religion, sports team), yours must fall. That is the world according to one wisdom. I highly suspect that all of us have believed this at some point or believe this scheme currently, and for good reason: it’s what we are bombarded with in our culture all the time, whether it’s to buy this car or that shirt or this club membership or that supplement in order to have meaning behind one’s citizenship. There are only so many of these resources, so get yours today!
From our ecological angle, we appear justified in our above sentiment. We have long realized that our Earth has limited resources and we are doing a great job of pushing those resources to their limits. Centuries of deforestation, tech-advance abuse, digging out mountains, draining rivers, etc., has led us to the brink of what our world can take. In addition, we have seen that the way we eat also has a massive impact on our world. The resources needed to sustain animal-based diets compared with plant-based ones are astounding, both in space needed, antibiotics used, carbon compounds emitted, and energy put into them to be transitioned into humans for energy.
Plant-based diets put far less strain on our resources, and they produce far less pollution when compared to animal-based diets. This would seem to permit us to more likely experience “over abundance”, if we can receive all the nutrition we would ever need while preserving the world. This could turn the environmental calculations of what and how much time we have left in the world pointed in a more favorable direction for us. Imagine a planet of natural reciprocity, in which we create civilization in a manner that minimizes any damage or ill-effect on the world around, even enhancing it, and in return the natural world provides us with optimized nutrition that yields good growth and development, prevention of disease, and superb fitness and well being.
This sounds like a world of over-abundance, homeostasis and generosity, the type of place intended for us in the Hebrew Bible. We are supposed to live lives of prosperity, productivity, and creativity, making a place where we all can live up to our divine vocation of making this space more like what God intended us to do with it, a reflection of heaven here and now. What that would do for our relationships, our community, if we did that! More human and global wholeness, less destruction.
There may be no better celebration or inspirational art form concerning the abundant world around than the psalmist’s 104th work. The piece is dripping with allusions to the creation story of Genesis 1: blanketed the earth with water, then roared the mountains and valleys out of the ocean. The writer celebrates the divinely exerted control of the chaotic waters into “springs of rivers…flowing among the hills.” We see the abundance in the provision of water for the animals, birds, donkeys, livestock, both directly to quench thirst, and indirectly by watering the grass so that the creatures may eat, referencing the diet intended for the beasts in Genesis.
Lucky for us, this extends to humans. And from this, “grain from the land and wine to make people happy” extends “health” (v14-15). We are described as “well-fed and hearty.” We often describe our health in multi-faceted ways like physical, social, spiritual, and mental. If this is meant to describe the well being of a person in the ancient Jewish paradigm, there is no differentiation among these facets of the person; all is included in a single description. So if the “grain and wine” bring health, we can expect all parts of ourselves to experience this health, all from these foods which come from the land as vegetation.
We see a world in which the rest of Creation is under the umbrella of care from its Creator, in abodes for the animals, nourishment for them, time marked by the cyclical moon patterns, and humans participating in daily work, the vocation we were given originally. In these passages, we do not get from them what God is providing the roaring lions or the sea fish or leviathan. Though the lions are looking for prey (other living animals we’d assume), God is providing great abundance here in our present, fallen world as well as the Garden world, in congruence with what we see around us and with the requirements of life for survival and prosperity.
The idea of a world that is overabundant in its provisions likely seems foreign to many of us. We frequently live paycheck to paycheck, just barely getting by on a daily basis, similar to the early humans. The great technological advances of our day benefit, for the most part, a select few who already had the wealth and economic power in place to take advantage of newly developing technologies, and while life for most people has improved somewhat, life for those few has improved vastly. We see environmental crises all over the globe, from catastrophic continental fires, to polar temperature shifts, to massive amounts of trash on beaches and in oceans all over the world. There are waves of migrating people all over the world, people fleeing persecution, poverty, and disease. These conditions causing migration did not happen out of nowhere, but rather they resulted from human decisions to maximize benefit for a few, in turn limiting livelihood for the many and causing them to leave their homes in search of their survival. Things may seem on the brink of collapse, or at least a major uncomfortable reset. How can we say we live in an abundant world with all this around us?
If we continue to direct our own lives and communities in a way that seeks maximum resources for our own tribes at any cost necessary, what is “good in our own eyes,” we may expect the above scenario to play out, and we will remain pessimistic in our view of what our world can sustain for our species. If we adjust our worldview toward one of taking just what we need to live well, and of preserving that which we do not need for other people and Creation itself, we enter into a new mode of thinking that is foreign to our initial natural inclinations. One may refer to this as ruling the earth on God’s terms and not humans’ terms. Of the many facets of what this rule looks like, one of them is the food we put into our bodies to sustain them. Now that we have the ability to ensure good nutrition and health for us and for our environment, we should begin to exert that ability. We may find the world would look much different through our eyes if we did.