Michael Severance, operations manager for Istituto Acton in Rome, wrote an article for Catholic World Report examining the economic concept of scarcity in light of Laudato Si’ and Pope Francis’s trip to South America.

Severance focuses on the pope’s efforts to promote a culture of self-control and asceticism and specifically analyzes the implications of paragraph 222 of the encyclical, where Francis writes: “We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that ‘less is more’”(222).

Acknowledging the difference in perspectives between ecologists and economists, Severance explains how theories of scarcity and “finiteness” apply to the current ecological debate. He concludes that there is merit to the optimistic side of the conversation, which “[trusts] in human capacity to deal inventively with the increasing demands on scarce goods while balancing environmental concerns.”

Do we want less of everything in order to return to some pure form of Eden-like abundance, to go back to the original state of nature free of the high demands of industry and consumers squeezing mother earth’s resources dry? And are we really running out of finite resources, in the first place, or actually creating more because of human ingenuity?

Read the full text of “Is Less Really More? Reflections on Scarcity in Laudato Si'” here.