Although video games seem to be a product of a culture of abundance, they create challenges for their players by requiring them to negotiate conditions of lack, as can be seen in the recent rise in games that portray post-apocalyptic worlds in which scattered survivors have to scavenge for basic resources in barren environments and destroyed ecosystems.

In literature and the arts, scarcity has often been given a positive interpretation as something to be cherished not shunned, actively endorsed and idealized rather than dismissed as an obstacle to artistic success.

This essay looks at science fiction works by Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin from the 1970s in which visions of scarcity are both critiques of abundance and utopian gestures. Today, Ramírez argues, scarcity has lost its critical power.

Through a short account of French reclamation in Algeria, this paper shows that it is between two divergent notions of environmental agency—environments acted upon and environments acting—that unruliness emerges as a provocative and potentially useful theme for environmental historians.