We don't know what our behaviors do. Like the person who walks across the floor thumping hard enough to make the china rattle in the next room, most of us are not aware of the impacts of our normal, seemingly benign, behavior.

Nice people, who give flowers to their spouses often do not realize that the land of the flower plantations used to grow food -- food for us and food for animals.

They don't realize that some of the children of those food farmers, and animal foragers cannot find (or earn enough money to buy) food to sustain themselves.

A mechanism describes how flower givers, create scarcity, how this scarcity takes the well-being of others, and thus, why our planet has ever growing social conflict and environmental destruction.

This mechanism, shows scarcity is not driven by the flower givers alone. For if you could snap you fingers and have all the flower givers disappear, only a short time would elapse before new flower givers would reemerge.

This mechanism shows itself to be driven by the collective behaviors of 6 billion people. Each person, eating and when possible giving flowers, is creating footfalls that unknowingly shake someone else's life.

The question we face today, is, "How to give, flowers to our spouses, and not have it result in other people suffering?"

One answer is for everyone to walk more softly. However, this is counter to the concept of living better, for example, giving flowers more often.

The alternative is letting every person live better, give flowers more often, but have many fewer people to feed. Then, it is OK to grow flowers on land that is no longer needed to grow food.

This mechanism tells us that: a balance between number of people and their level of well being must be the guide to our procreative behavior.