"The tragedy of the commons", posted as a PSA from...

[mike_c]

...another generation. Among my other pursuits, I teach an undergraduate course in general ecology where Garritt Hardin's classic essay is just as potent a commentary today as it was 35 years ago.

Here's a snippet or three:

"The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated."

"An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance-that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin."

"The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon."

Here's an HTML version with links to a PDF file: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243

[ludwigb]

1. I remember reading that back in my Environmental Ethics class

Thought provoking, but a little bizarre for my taste. I think we have to be very careful of attempts to apply scientific pardigms to political thinking.

For myself, I lean towards Aldo Leopold's "The Land Ethic". Wise and beautifully written.

[mike_c]

3. put six mice of mixed gender in a closed box with...

...five pounds of grain and 10 gallons of water. Wait six months. The outcome will be horrible, and it won't have anything to do with mouse politics (well, until they begin infanticide, anyway).

We're just in a bigger box.

You're right about Leopold, but bear in mind that Hardin was writing for a different audience and was trying to raise a rather ugly issue.

[rfranklin]

2. Is he referring to Richard Mellon Scaife?

"An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact."

[hunter]

4. mike_c please report for mandatory sterilization!

"The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon."

Garrett Hardin used to irritate the hell out of me, especially when I was in college. A couple of times I had the pleasure of meeting him, and I told him as much.

Heh. He always took that opportunity to yank my chain.

If I was a masochist I'd go back and dig through some of the stuff I wrote about him, and to him, but instead I used google and I found this:

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/

Horrors! Hardin always made me think, but often it was the same way that living through a car wreck makes you think. It's not exactly a happy memory, even though you'll forever praise the use of seatbelts. (I speak as one who had seatbelt bruises on my chest and hips, and held a broken steering wheel in my hands.

Much of the current conflagrations of the Sierra Club can be traced back to Hardin. I quit the Sierra Club during a similar conflagration, and I'm glad I did. I don't need that bullshit. There are guys working in the fields, illegal aliens, who are far better men than I am. Their kids will know how to do the right thing. If not, humanity dies, and Mother Nature cleans up our mess. Mother Nature has all the time in the world. Mankind's garbage simply becomes a peculiar layer in the fossil record.

I never really knew if Garret Hardin was attributing too much or too little to the power of the human spirit. But simply seeing his picture, and hearing his name, yanks my chains again.