The Tragedy of the Commons

“We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land.”

As human populations increase, people tend to build out into the wilderness until it’s taken over and transformed by human activity. As this process begins to strain ecosystems beyond their limits, people will have to choose what to build and what to restrict, but those choices can be difficult. Nature does it simply, by killing off organisms that outgrow their limits, or by reducing the numbers of those that exploit their environs in especially damaging manners. Either way, humans have some tough decisions lying ahead that will decide whether they, and other life forms on the planet, will survive. 

“Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone. What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis [sic] merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.”

When populations increase, it strains resources, especially for things like national parks, which are static in size. That they’re cheaply or freely available to all leads to crowds of campers, whose sheer number threatens to damage park ecosystems. The result is that parks are destroyed because they’re desirable. 

“The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprises.”

Polluters do so because it’s cheap to dump pollutants, and the tiny addition to environmental degradation will feel negligible to the polluter. It’s thus not the polluter who pays the full cost of the pollution but the public at large. Only the public can fix this problem, usually by penalizing the polluter. 

“‘Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles,’ my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.”

The problem of pollution only partly concerns technologies that emit poisons. It mainly concerns the increasing human population that causes the problem, since a world with 10 times the human population will pollute 10 times more. Thus, the single biggest environmental protection comes from stopping the ongoing population growth and its effluents. 

“Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.”

Pollution’s effect on the environment depends on the amount of that pollution. A single act of environmental degradation—for example, a frontiersman who kills a single bison for its tongue, leaving behind a carcass among tens of millions of other live buffalo—has virtually no effect on an environment, but thousands of hunters killing millions of buffalo can devastate an ecosystem. As human numbers rise, their impact grows until mismanagement of resources leads toward ecological collapse and a disaster that could threaten humanity itself. 

“‘Thou shalt not . . .’ is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world.”

In the modern, densely populated world, simple legal prohibitions can cause more harm than good. There may be situations where a simple ban—against, for example, controlled burns—can make a problem worse. A group of 300 can deal simply with local problems, but a nation of 300 million must consider the vast complexities of all its human activities, both within its borders and beyond. 

“To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.”

Section 6 addresses Hardin’s concerns about welfare states, in which there are sometimes tax and income advantages to having more children. Though this policy may be adopted for altruistic reasons, Hardin contends that the resulting suite of financial incentives can cause an increase in population that puts more pressure on the environment. Governments must plan carefully to avoid those pitfalls. 

“It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus.”

The author quotes C. G. Darwin, mathematician and grandson of Charles Darwin, who explains that people who have fewer children, for whatever reason, are outbred by people who have more offspring, until humans are dominated by members who produce more children. Hardin accordingly argues that attempts to lower the birthrate by acts of civic conscience will, after several generations, be overcome by those couples who don’t limit their family size. Appeals to conscience as a contraceptive, therefore, tend to fail over time and even exacerbate the population problem. This is one of Hardin’s arguments for the more direct solution: laws that restrict family size. 

“If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen […] If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons.”

Hardin imagines a future wherein appeals to conscience are the chief dissuasion from reproducing: A person who’s asked to limit their number of offspring either refuses and gets condemned or agrees while others reproduce at will. Either way, they lose. Appeals to conscience are therefore self-limiting; other means of persuasion must be used. 

“Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for nothing.”

Sometimes appeals to conscience are in fact political gambits to get others to remove themselves so that the appealer’s group can better access a resource. False responsibility is living up to some other group’s purposes out of a feeling of guilt. A mutually successful solution requires not that one group guilt-trip another into giving them resources, but that both groups come to an agreement that apportions the resource carefully and fairly. 

“The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort […] The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”

Since appeals to conscience are counter-productive, some other arrangement is called for. One that’s commonly used and often effective is coercion by mutual consent. In a democracy, for example, various groups may reach an understanding about what activities should be encouraged or banned. Under such systems, bank robbing is bad and legally penalized, while donations are good and encouraged by tax advantages and public applause. Such agreements tend to have considerable support and can be enforced successfully. 

“[…] the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.”

With the growth of humanity, the simple use of resources has become complex, to the point of overly stressing the environment. Where a commonly held resource once contained plenty for all, with overuse it diminishes and may vanish; enough such problems and entire ecosystems may collapse. The unregulated commons represents the old way of thinking; careful caretaking, population control, and coercive laws will be needed if ecosystems—and the resources they provide to people—are to be preserved. 

“When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals.”

The irony of laws against misuse of the commons is that they restrict the individual freedom to pollute but at the same time resolve environmental problems that threaten everyone’s freedom and happiness. Smog and water pollution, for example, cause health problems that limit people’s ability to pursue their goals. Thus, laws against polluting have the ironic effect of increasing overall freedom.