Why do we always think in terms of scarcity?
A tomato seed. Planted, it gives a plant. The plant produces on average about ten tomatoes. Each tomato contains about 200 to 300 seeds. Do the math simply: a single seed, in one season, can generate several thousand new seeds.
Start again the following year with these seeds, and the number literally explodes. One seed. One plant. Ten tomatoes. About 3,000 seeds. Plant these 3,000 seeds: 3,000 plants, and potentially 18,000 tomatoes in just one subsequent generation.
This is not an anomaly. It is the basic logic of life.
Nature does not think in fixed quantities.
We tend to reason about nature as we reason about a stock: a resource that we extract, which decreases, that we need to conserve. This is true for oil. It is true for many minerals. But this is not the logic of life.
A single tomato plant, a single dandelion, a single daisy never produces "just enough" to reproduce identically.. It produces in excess, systematically, by the hundreds or thousands. Nature does not operate on a principle of controlled scarcity.It operates on a principle of permanent abundance precisely because it has no guarantee that each seed will survive, germinate, or reach maturity.
The exponential is not an excess of life. It is its survival strategy.
So why is the world not overwhelmed with tomatoes?
If each seed actually produced a plant, and each plant thousands of seeds, in a few generations the amount of theoretical biomass would become absurd — far beyond what a garden, a field, or even a planet could support.
That never happens, and that is precisely what is interesting. The exponential exists in theory in every seed, but it is immediately regulated by the system that surrounds it : the availability of water, light, space, soil nutrients, competition among plants, predators, diseases, the climate. Of the thousands of seeds produced, only a handful will germinate. Of those germinations, only a fraction will reach maturity.
Nature never produces what it could produce at maximum. It produces in excess, then lets the system regulate what survives.
What it says about our relationship to scarcity
This is where the gap with our human logic becomes interesting. We have built our societies, our economies, our gardens sometimes, on an obsession with control and optimization: not wasting, calculating just what is needed, avoiding surplus. A logic that makes sense at the scale of a business or a budget. Much less so at the scale of an ecosystem.
When we systematically weed before seed setting, when we cut a meadow before the flowers have had time to reseed, when we treat every plant surplus as waste to be exported rather than as a resource to be allowed to circulate, we precisely interrupt this mechanism of regulated abundance that allows life to sustain itself, adapt, and diversify over time.
The scarcity that we think we manage by intervening all the time is often a scarcity that we have created ourselves by preventing natural abundance from expressing itself.
The real question
The question is not whether nature can produce abundantly. It does, continuously, far beyond what will actually survive.
The real question is: are we capable of allowing this abundance to express itself and regulate itself, or do we continue to intervene even before it has had the chance to do so?
A tomato seed does not ask for our permission to produce thousands of other seeds. It simply asks us not to pull it up too early.