My cup overflows.
While out for a stroll a friend asked his wife if she noticed how plants in our tiny area of the world seem to fill in every corner and available gap during our diminutive growing season. If I scrape down to uncovered soil with bulldozer or shovel, plants of all types will rapidly move in. Given an adequate amount of undisturbed time, layer after layer of plants and then trees will take over, until it creates a carpet of green nearly 100 feet thick. In the tropics that life power of plants seems to be even stronger.
It seems as if wherever there are suitable temperatures and watering environment on our blue planet, plants will raise in abundance. Ecologists endeavor to establish the rate of production in an ecosystem (a community of organisms tailored to a particular environment, as in a desert or jungle). One commonly acknowledged way to do that is to gauge the amount of new stuff (biomass) or the quantity of new energy (kilocalories) added to the ecosystem per unit time. Recording the amount of carbon dioxide plants take out of the air and convert to leaf tissue gives us an all right pointer of how much natural carbon (formed and stored in the plant tissues) is being produced, a measurement called gross primary productivity (GPP). But plants themselves tap off some of the things (or some of the energy) for their own life processes. Subtracting what plants use to preserve themselves from the GPP gives a fine value for net primary productivity (NPP). NPP is the amount of things or energy that what’s left to feed all the people and all the animals in the world.
So how much stuff gets made per unit time? From the best computations that ecologists can figure, annual NPP in the most fruitful areas of both terrestrial and aquatic systems is just about equal at 1.8 to 2.8 pounds of carbon per square yard (1 to 1.5 kilograms per square meter) per year. With that type of efficiency, a plot the dimension of a football field would create approximately 8-13 tons (7,000-12,000 kilograms) of carbon per year. Other places such as deserts or the middle of the ocean form slight by comparison. Drastic latitudinal and seasonal disparities also exist. But when we put the whole picture as best it can be figured, the biosphere (the living things) of earth manufactures a stunning 116 billion tons (104.9 petagrams) of carbon per year.
In every area of life God give lavishly. There is no stinginess or lack of resources. Sometimes when we think we may be running out, God will be there again, giving a good measure, pressing down and running over.