Water, Wind, Breath: Seeking Abundance in the Northern American Southwest

The concept of scarcity has played a fundamental role in traditional economic theory (Robbins 1932; Smith 2012:29). Stated in its simplest terms, traditional theoretical perspectives view scarcity as inherent to human economic life because people are seen as having unlimited wants that cannot be satisfied as they live in a world of limited resources. William Dugger and James Peach (2009:1–19) discuss an equally long historical thread where economists have contemplated an alternative economy of abundance in which resources are not viewed as inherently finite and fixed because they can be transformed and multiplied by advances in knowledge and technological