The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited
Read Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay first if you haven’t
So far as I know Garrett Hardin’s essay has been thoroughly refuted and proven to be a dangerous myth by all right thinking moderns (as has the 1972 Limits to Growth) except for those who understood the issue the first time they heard about it (those who would rather know than believe).
Viewing a resource, e.g. the world’s oceans today, or the planet’s land surface about 75k years ago, as a resource for the taking always has a tragic outcome (long term). Takers, for 75k years, have been selected to not understand, to be unable to understand that an unmanaged commons that expansionist humans with technology have access to (e.g. the Amazon River basin today) will be taken profitably and gloriously for a time, greatly benefiting the short-term self interests of all involved in the taking (including those who like cheaper hamburgers).
Those who (e.g. economists and political scientists) can convincingly explain why ecologists who understand Hardin’s essay (and Malthus’) are “not even wrong” (the ultimate error category), are celebrated as the saviors they are (e.g. political scientist and political economist Elinor Ostrom, fully qualified to refute a mere human ecologist like Garrett Hardin who, as a white nationalist, wanted to kill black babies (why else would anyone focus on so-called “overpopulation”?) — cancel culture goes back further than most realize.
Oh, but do American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence? Yes. It is now hard to find any source that has not bought into the cancel culture narrative, but searching for “garrett hardin contributions to ecology” helps turn up his offspring (contributions to science and sanity) among the bathwater of hate speech heaped upon him).
Hardin’s contributions to science fill over 34 linear feet of library shelf space. I haven’t read all of it, but while political behavior is within the purview of a human ecologist, none of his writings are political, though political animals view all of it as politically motivated hate speech, perhaps because that is all they can traffic in, i.e. “for” and “against” cognitive pathology (‘The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.’ — Jianzhi Sengcan, aka Seng-Ts’an, b. ?-606 CE).
So let’s go back to the essay that caused almost as much dissonance (and hatred) as Thomas Malthus’ essay of 1798 (published anonymously) — for the better reasoned and evidenced, there is the sixth edition of 1826 that should be used to refute every claim he makes. [Note that both links I used were the first result offered by Google search, and both are proud of being on the cancel culture’s list as the site is the ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY, ironically a pro classical liberal and free market drum beater, but that they don’t or can’t read Hardin with any due understanding either is equally too bad for posterity. In apolitical abelief is the renormalization of humanity.]
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The Tragedy of the [Unmanaged] Commons
The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. By Garrett Hardin, 1968
Garrett Hardin did retract part of this essay — its title. He opined that he should have called it ‘The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons’ to maybe mitigate the tsunami of misunderstanding the omission of the implied word seemed to generate, but he would have been wrong as his opponents (all right-thinking servants of the world socioeconomic-political system, would merely have had to work harder to obfuscate his claims).
At best, what humans call a commons is managed by humans for humans to maximum human short-term benefit while keeping the harm within acceptable limits (if any) acceptable to humans (e.g. property owner), i.e. all commons not managed using the principles of systemic management are mismanaged (but 100% of Anthropocene enthusiasts, the 99+%, don’t want to know this).
So sorry about the intro, as what is of interest is adding to Hardin’s essay, or rather, the real tragedy unfolding all about us (the one we don’t understand). The added bits are the ecological ideas of scramble competition (or complete symmetric competition or exploitation competition) and contest competition (e.g. between property owners).
In human ecology, scramble competition is the unmanaged commons and contest competition is the mismanaged commons, i.e. the commons (from a pasture to the planet) that humans “manage” to maximally turn environmental productivity (primary e.g. green plants and secondary e.g. consumable animals) into humans.
Of course, the successful products of the modern education system cannot interpret the above graphic even though only a few numbers are used, so I won’t bother trying. I will note that “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.“ — Isaac Asimov. First, learn how to do your own research (this may take only a few decades), then do it (and in a few decades you may make some progress).
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To repeat what you should have come to have some understanding of in high school, scramble competition is how humans treat ‘common pool’ resources — everyone has access and those who benefit most are those who take the most (extract from the planet, e.g. oceans/fishing trawlers). Depletion follows, everybody loses.
Contest competition is a good description of the Enclosure Movement; a few powerful individuals acquire a monopoly on productive assets (land and resources ) and they have higher progeny survival rates. Everyone else gets to be a slave laborer (a wage slave like you) with malnourished sickly children (or not if you university trained to sever the economy or otherwise work hard and have technical services to offer so you can make lots of money to also serve the economy as a hyper-consumer). Private property rights enshrined in law ensure perpetuation of inequality (e.g. the system that works best to metastatically grow the economy per laws of open thermodynamic systems, stupid).
The Enclosure Movement was a movement in the 18th and 19th centuries to convert land that was previously owned by a community into private property. The movement involved wealthy landowners enclosing communal lands that were previously available for grazing and growing food. The land was then divided into separate plots, surrounded by hedges and ditches, and given to private owners.
The Second Enclosure Movement is a movement that criticizes the knowledge economy and the privatization and fragmentation of knowledge created by the extension of copyright law, but while of interest, it is not on topic.
To visually understand the difference (possibly the only hope for the well schooled), this satellite view is “objective” data, even if the interpretation can be obfuscated.
Today, we persist — for a time — in a world that is in the ICU facing multiple system failures.
The region above is the Sahel, but pick anywhere else on the planet apart from some areas of Greenland whose ice is being rapidly degraded.
who, as expansionist humans, are excluded for some reason.
Our brave new world order is not remotely sustainable (and not because I say so). Listen to Nature, the Gaian system.
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Oh, and the required “fundamental extension in morality?”
A nature centric (not human centric) worldview/mindset/culture/form of civilization that comes when we know the planet again for the first time.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, originally published 1943.
