Thoughts on scarcity vs abundance

While working with the Transitions initiative, I've assessed David Holmgren's wisdom on permaculture. I found this passage particularly thought provoking. “In society generally there's an enormous sense of scarcity (whether real or apparent) like clean air. The process of growing up and becoming an adult is a process of pouring a lot of stuff into your head or you won't grow up. In sustainable societies, growing up is everywhere, you don't have to make it happen, it happens by itself; fresh air is an abundance, produced by trees all the time. Once seen as scarce it becomes a commodity, like bottled water. There's a sense of loosing everything. "Every tree is sacred because the planet is dying!" The farm landscape where you don't have anything to cut down is a dying landscape. Whereas there should be an abundance, a gift not an indulgence. Its the difference between a sense of abundance and one of gluttony which leads to power over nature and people. Especially in the western world, there is huge abundance but the sense of poverty.”