Garrett Hardin

The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world.

                                                                      Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin was a Texas ecologist (b. 1915, d. 2003), whose most widely read work is called The Tragedy of the Commons. In it, he discusses population, and lets population stand for any human choice that affects the environment's carrying capacity for humans.

His metaphor is a pasture (a "common") upon which a community of herdsmen feed their families' flocks. Each herdsman, as a rational being, will try to maximize the common's benefit to him by increasing the number of animals he runs. Any one of these pastoralists would be responsible for only marginal wear and tear on the pasture, but together, the community overgrazes it, and reduces the number of animals it can support, ultimately wrecking it.

This is parallel to human overpopulation, and to various other issues in which the interests of communities, or humanity as a whole, are different from those of individual, rational, economic beings. Hardin urged us to arrive at and regulate a consensus to regulate population, and those other issues.

More Constant Battles

Continuing with LeBlanc’s Constant Battles, I’m realizing that it’s useful, despite its thesis’ "going without saying." We’re beings which seek resources, as all do, and will plunder to get them, if that’s what it takes. There’s a pornographic appeal in reading about pre-historic atrocity, or stories from aboriginal sources about torture killings. If there’s value, though, in following LeBlanc’s grim telling of our past, it has to be that, in seeing our situation with new clarity, we can design a future that sidesteps the old horror, perpetrated with modern genius. Ka-boom!

We get out of ecological balance when we exceed our territory's carrying capacity, then we go to war so we can continue in our profligate ways. (I’d guess that the people we call conservatives have a more pressing sense of this than liberals, but lack the vocabulary to allow understanding and correction. Consequently, they’re morally content with empire, and practically confuse liberty and regimentation.)

Toward the end of Chapter Three, LeBlanc spins a scenario that resonates with Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons. He tells us that a given period’s competitors will have approximately the same technology, and that the larger population will prevail. (Bad news for the developed world, and -- from a limited point of view -- a sensible reason for the double standard over who gets to own nuclear weapons.)

He imagines two neighboring cultures. “Assume for a moment that by some miracle one of our two groups is full of farsighted ecological geniuses.” They keep their population far enough below carrying capacity, that they can survive minor changes in weather or climate.

“The second group, on the other hand is just the opposite -- it consists of ecological dimwits.” They don’t control their population, and operate right at their territory’s carrying capacity. They get a bad year, and raid the geniuses next door. Over the decades, the dimwits eliminate and replace the geniuses. It’s high school all over again, unless everybody does the right thing.

Hardin’s solution was “mutually agreed mutual coercion.” Figure out carrying capacity, and regulate reproduction. It’s a little more complicated with a global culture that converts fossil fuels into food, but avoiding catastrophe is the agenda for the rest of your lifetime, and mine.

Ten: Thinking About The Tragedy Of The Commons

The case is that overpopulation is a problem without a technical solution; the solution has to be in the behavior of individuals; individuals whose consciences allow them to act against the larger interest will out-compete individuals who act in the larger interest, and shape the future to fit their desires; coercion of individuals by society is necessary, both to keep irresponsible people from shaping the future, and to be fair to those same, conscienceless individuals; there are precedents for this kind of restricted freedom; society’s net freedom will increase because there will be less wear and tear on the commons, that decline restricting freedom by reducing wealth; the restriction, “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” must be negotiated among the members of society.

The web site where I read “The Tragedy of the Commons,” dieoff.org, includes an objection to Hardin’s argument, by Beryl Crowe. The essence of the objection is that social values are too diverse to allow the negotiation of mutual coercion.

Hardin was writing hard on the heels of the civil rights movement, and at the height of the Viet Nam War, and its antithetical social experimentation. Hardin himself seems to have been partisan to the antithesis, given his comments about the “Dark Age of Eros” and Puritanism. American society may have seemed almost monolithic then, in spite of war resistance, psychedelics, and the sexual revolution. America was a white protestant milieu, at a peak of human wealth, under the fairly benign gaze of paternalistic capitalism. Catholic and Jewish assimilation, black assertion of equal rights, feminism, Islam, Buddhism, new age beliefs, and immigration of various refugee populations have diversified American values, but the greatest challenges to finding an agreement to mutual coercion are probably the ascendance of a presumptuous brand of Christianity, and a suburban solipsism whose adherents believe that the First Amendment to the Constitution and one passage in the Declaration of Independence bestow equal value to every point of view, and absolve them from the “responsibility” (sorry, Garrett) to acknowledge a superior analysis, or even a problem: “I’m sorry. I just don’t believe that.”

Hardin was writing with more than half of the oil to be pumped still in the ground, and the promise of more to be discovered. Nuclear power was a popular energy strategy, most objections to it only demanding easily understood technological solutions. I can recall public service announcements on television about overpopulation, and Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet was not far in the future, but Hardin was writing ahead of his time. Since then we have reached the moment of peak oil, when getting oil becomes harder and the bidding for it fiercer. The world’s population in 1968 was 3.56 billion, in 2009 it will hit 6.8 billion, almost twice 1968’s figure. Besides fuel, people are struggling with soil depletion, species extinction, climate change, and economic catastrophes with various immediate or proximate causes but which are rooted in the problem of providing for a growing population from a finite world. The situation is has become critical.

Hardin’s prescription is frightening: “Let’s surrender some of our freedoms, and punish people who won’t cooperate.” Libertarianism is basic to any American’s world view. At a tender age, we hear about laissez faire capitalism in Social Studies Class, and think, “That’s a pretty good idea.” In my generation’s religious instruction, we heard that temporal authority is hierarchical, with the authority of the state bestowed by God, and recalled that a few years before, our fathers had gone to war against an expanding empire whose fantasies moved it to torture and kill millions of its own. We know that finally each of us must decide the nature of the world and our own ways of negotiating it. Not only is Hardin asking us to surrender freedom, he’s asking for an expansion of our understandings of the world so great that it bridges a foundational notion.

As I made these notes, two alternatives to Hardin’s choice between mutual coercion and crash occurred to me. The first was that a pervasive new myth, in harmony with modern understanding of the world might spread the necessary ethic. It doesn’t seem likely, but who would have bet on Christianity two thousand years ago? The other is a hope based on Buckminster Fuller’s saying, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Will permaculture be enough, or will we have to oblige everyone to mimic and integrate with nature?

Today's illustration is a painting I did about a year ago, The Hole-in-the-Wall Miser.

Tragedy Of The Commons IX: Recognition Of Necessity

Hardin summarizes that commons are 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.”

We started with food, abandoning hunting and gathering for agriculture. Later we abandoned the commons as space for waste disposal. Restrictions on sewerage disposal are typical in the developed world, but we ‘are still struggling” with disposal of toxins, radioactive waste, exhaust, etc.

“In a still more embryonic state, is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure.” Hardin mentions canned music, noisy airliners (specifically the SST which is now gone, leaving behind slower, but noisy enough kin), and advertising. He wonders if we are slower to recognize and regulate interference with pleasure because of Puritan guilt, and our acceptance of punishment for pleasure.

(There was a passage I didn’t outline in the section, “Pathogenic Effects of Conscience.” The passage about pleasure reminded me of it. “We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating mechanisms of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers. It is not a pretty one.” Alex Comfort was the author of The Joy of Sex. I approve Hardin’s recognition of pleasure and its repression, but have a hard time integrating that with this essay.)

Hardin says every enclosure of the commons infringes on somebody’s liberty.

(“Enclosure of the commons” is a specific historical reference to the nobility’s forcing peasants and yeoman farmers into mines and factories.)

Past infringements don’t disturb us because, never having had the liberties, we don’t feel the loss. New infringements make us conscious of our rights or prerogatives. Hardin asks what freedom means. He says that when people outlawed robbery, we became more free. “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.” He quotes Hegel that “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.”

Our greatest current necessity is to abandon the commons in breeding. He reminds us that there is no technical solution to overpopulation. He continues to recap that we’re tempted to propagandize for conscience so that we don’t have to do the hard work of negotiating coercion. We should avoid that “temptation, because an appeal to conscience selects for the disappearance of conscience in the long run, and increases anxiety in the short run.

He says this is the only way we can “nurture other and more precious freedoms.” Education should “reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed.”

Tragedy Of The Commons VIII: Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon

In this section, Hardin begins, “The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion of some sort.” He argues in general that it is proper to institute coercive reforms, beginning with the obvious extreme of prohibiting banks robbers’ treating banks as commons. This section mostly argues by providing a series of examples. From bank robbery prohibition, Hardin moves to one in which society coerces temperance.

Parking meters and fines are ways in which “carefully biased options limit parking. Hardin says he prefers the “candor of the word coercion” to calling this persuasion. Coercion is a dirty word but Hardin says that it need not remain so. He isn’t talking, he says, about the coercion of remote, arbitrary bureaucrats, but “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” “We accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless.”

He says this coercion doesn’t have to be perfectly just to be preferable to the commons, and supports this assertion with the example of private property and legal inheritance. Hardin says that justice would require that “ those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power” should inherit more, but that heirs often lack their ancestors’ virtues. We tolerate the system of property and legal inheritance because “the alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate,” and “injustice is preferable to total ruin.”

(I didn’t realize we were so thoughtful. It seems to me that we have the system we do because people organize to maintain their status. It may be that this system is preferable to the commons, but I’d like to throw a hankering for justice into the mix. Is custodial fitness for wealth and power identical to the fitness it takes to accumulate wealth and power? I’m sure I’m not the only schoolboy who noticed a paradox in which a good king was preferable to a venal and ignorant democracy, but that the good king could spawn a tyrant or fool.)

Hardin points out that there is a war between the status quo and reform, governed by a double standard. Reform must be perfect to be instituted, and requires unanimous consent. He believes inertia is based on two unconscious assertions: “that the status quo is perfect,” or “that the choice we face is between reform and no action.” We think we should wait for a perfect proposal before reforming.

Status quo is action. We should measure the costs and benefits of both status quo and reform, “discounting as best we can for our lack of experience,” and act in our best interests.

Tragedy Of The Commons VII: Pathogenic Effects Of Conscience

An appeal to conscience has short as well as long-term disadvantages. Near the end of this section, Hardin says that responsibility is an attempt by society to get something for nothing.

(Individual do or forbear to do something because it is right. In exchange society ought to hold those individual harmless, relative to their competitors. If some individuals act in the general interest because it is right, and others individuals act in their own interests, against the larger interest, society has the advantage of the responsible individuals’ actions, without the cost of protecting them.)

The exploiter in the appeal to conscience hears that he will be condemned as irresponsible if he continues, and as a “simpleton” if he stops. Hardin invokes Bateson’s Double-Bind Theory of Schizophrenia.

("Double-Bind," not "double-blind." The idea is that paradoxical communication sets up the receiver to expect punishment no matter how he chooses: “Tell me you love me.” “I love you.” “Why do you only say you love me when I ask you?” An appeal to conscience will probably not produce many schizophrenics because the targets of appeals-to-conscience presumably have fully-formed ego, but it may be that pathological. The exploiter who is contemplating reform may expect the appeal’s founders to use his holding back to out-compete him. Certainly somebody will.)

Hardin says that appeals to conscience are tempting to leaders. He says every president in “the past generation” (Truman to Johnson) has asked labor to voluntarily keep wages low, and asked steel companies to keep prices low.

(More recently, Robert Reich, in his book Supercapitalism, has accused Congress of holding hearings, in which, by castigating business people, they appear vigilant, and business gets to continue to exploit, neither suffering the inconvenience of regulatory legislation. Appeals to conscience are a way for leaders to act without risking political capital. Talk is cheap.)

Hardin quotes Paul Goodman on guilt: “ ‘No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties’.”

Hardin opposes policies of which the “tendency (if not the intention) is psychologically pathogenic.” Propaganda campaigns “browbeat” people into acting against their own interests. “Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit of a substantial quid pro quo.”

(The honest quid pro quo would be honest commerce, facilitated by regulation.)

Hardin says that if the word is used at all, it should be “the product of definite social arrangements.”

Tragedy Of The Commons VI: Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

We can’t control population by an appeal to conscience. Hardin says the argument is straightforward and Darwinian.

* Some people will respond to the appeal to conscience more than others;

* Those who don’t will produce more of the next generation;

* Differences will increase with each generation, with more active breeders coming to dominate.

(I believe this is the case for other appeals to conscience. A polluter has an economic advantage over his more scrupulous competitor. Because people organize to defend and expand their interests the more successful competitors will be better able to codify their right to pollute -- and to increase their increasingly larger share of the commons -- and to persuade others of the propriety of their doing so. This would extinguish Homo greenus, replaced by Homo pollutus.)

I’ll quote the entire final paragraph of this section, but Hardin uses a word “exosomatically” which I couldn’t find in either my dictionary or college Biology textbook. He’s talking about attitudes that children acquire from family custom and other social conditioning. (Exo=Outside; Somatic=Body)

“The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary -- but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka’s term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what’s the point of education?) The argument has been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good -- by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.”

(Once again, you don’t have to be a Darwinian to buy this. If you kept tall people from marrying, you would breed short people. If you kept literate people from marrying, you would breed illiterates. If you rewarded short or illiterate people for marrying, the results would be the same.)

Tragedy of the Commons V: Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable

Hardin uses a quote from an essay for International Planned Parenthood News by U Thant in this section. U Thant was secretary general of the United Nations between 1961 and 1971, maybe the period when that body was most effective and widely respected. “ ‘The Universal Declaration on Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.’”

Hardin disagrees vehemently and essentially (and regretfully?) with U Thant’s assertion. He says that population affects the commons by its demands on resources as well as by using it as a sink for pollution. In a “dog-eat-dog” world parents who breed too enthusiastically would contribute less the gene pool/world’s population. (Note that the contribution is to both the number of booties on the ground, and to the population’s character.) Enthusiastic parents would be less able to care for their children, so fewer children would survive. He says this has been found to be the case among birds. “But men are not birds,” and may never have acted like birds. We don’t let the children of improvident parents starve. Hardin says society is committed to the welfare state. (Maybe the commitment is deeper than society, deeper than inventions like the welfare state. Hardin hinted at this in the discussion about birds, saying, men have not acted like birds for millenniums, at least.) The fact of the matter is that overbreeding limits the freedoms of society’s less prolific members, by concentrating resources among the more prolific families. (This is the point when Hardin most succinctly and cogently makes the case for what seems like a trespass, limiting human freedom at its most intimate. I don’t have to allow you the freedom to promiscuously limit my freedom. This thought resonates with Hardin’s earlier statement that “It is when hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin.” I think he would agree that many of our libertarian inhibitions are merely conditioned, although this thought is far beyond any of “Tragedy’s” discussions.)

(In this section, Hardin is introducing the idea of selection in human heredity. You don’t have to believe that species come into being because of natural selection to recognize that humans pass on their physical characteristics. If you were to prevent marriage between tall people, over the generations, there would be fewer and fewer tall people.)

“...if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, overbreeding brought its own ‘punishment’ to the germ line -- then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is so deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.”

(What is the "tragedy of the commons"? It is that individuals' "rationally" maximizing their own gains from a common resource, inevitably ruins the common.)

The dilemma in a contemporary “welfare state” is that freedom to breed is recognized as inalienable, and everyone is seen as having an equal right to the commons. Hardin says this dilemma “locks the world into a tragic course of action.”

Because this dilemma is held adamantly, either formally or tacitly in most of the world (this is the point when Hardin quotes U Thant), it’s difficult but important to deny “the validity of this right.” Hardin says that in denying it he imagines he knows how difficult it would have been for a seventeenth century resident of Salem, Massachusetts to deny the existence of witches. He says that there is a liberal taboo against speaking against the UN which has articulated the idea of a right to breed freely. He recommends speaking openly against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and persuading both the UN and Planned Parenthood away from their points of view.

Tragedy Of The Commons IV: How To Legislate Temperance

Hardin Says,“The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.” In other words an act may be moral at one time and immoral at another.

(This is situation ethics, which usually seems to refer to divergences from religion’s or society’s prohibitions. Thou shalt not commit adultery, except in cases of... What I think Hardin is getting at is a harder morality. Individuals -- or society -- need to know when to refrain from doing things they think of as perfectly benign, even necessary. Hardin’s main case is reproduction, but I think of diet, in terms of both curbing gluttony, and tailoring diet according to economic and ecological circumstances: What is the diet for a small planet?)

Hardin says this follows from an analysis of pollution as a function of population. Pollution of the frontier doesn’t harm the common good. In a city it can’t be allowed. Likewise frontiersmen could be careless in harvesting bison, but we have to manage the few that remain.

Hardin says that the morality of shooting an elephant or setting grasslands on fire “doesn’t show up in a photograph.” “The essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally -- in words.”

(Was there a public service announcement on television that I don’t remember from the time, showing dead elephants or a burning savanna? In any case, the cliche is to accuse an anecdote of being “just a snapshot,” one moment of many.)

Our traditional morality is not “system-sensitive.” It is a list of prohibitions, “Thous shalt not.” This doesn’t work to govern a “complex, crowded, changeable world.” Because we don’t know when it’s okay to shoot an elephant or dump industrial waste into a stream, we “augment statutory law with administrative law.” We make laws that create corruption -- offices of vulnerable, venal, or incompetent bureaucrats. “Quis custodiet ispsos custodes?” “Who watches the watchmen?” Hardin quotes John Adams that we must have a government of laws, not men, and says that bureaucracies create governments of men, not laws, but lands, with regret on the side of bureaucracy.

(The ultimate answer, maybe not in this century, but eventually, must be wisdom. The problem is how to reach that time when everyone wises up. The bureaucracy is the expedient. We might hope that religion would answer, Bateson’s gods’ standing for cybernetic function, while we do our purposive, non-cybernetic calculations. Would that mean a change in existing churches’ teachings, or a new cult? Traditional myths don’t fit with modern understandings, churchgoers take their religion cafeteria style, and thinkers who could forge new myth would have a hard time taking the task seriously.)

Prohibition is easy, but temperance is hard. Hardin says, “We must limit possibilities unnecessarily, if we suppose the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies the use of administrative law. The great challenge facing us now is how to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep the custodians honest.” The authority of the custodians and the feedbacks must be legitimate.

Tragedy Of The Commons III: Pollution

The tragedy Hardin outlines -- individuals’ maximizing personal wealth by overgrazing resources -- works similarly with pollution. A polluter pays the same tiny fraction of his damages as any other member of society, but increases his wealth without shring it. “We are locked into a system of fouling our own nest, so long as we behave as independent, rational free enterprisers.”

Private property, Hardin says, keeps us from overgrazing our land. (Maybe. Private landowners in 1968, and this year, allow soil loss, planting commodity crops.) But water and air practically have to be commons, and require “coercive laws” to protect them. Writing in 1968, Hardin says, “We have not progressed as far with the solution (to pollution) as we have with (overgrazing).”

(Hardin was writng four years in advance of the Federal Water Pollution Amendments of 1972, and nine years before the Clean Water Act, so we have made progress. We haven’t had a Great Lake catch fire for decades, but I would be skeptical about drinking from the Mississippi, which flows a mile and a half from my house, and I know I couldn’t take a mouthful of water from the creek back home without gagging. In the past year, there has been some attention to water pollution from compounds claimed by power plant stack scrubbers, and the murder of streams by mountain top removal. I assume the scrubbers are mandated, and the legislators goofed in not anticipating the new waste stream. Mountaintop removal is just goofy. The coal companies own the mountains, but have no plans for the land once the coal is exhausted, so effectively they’re renting it, and treat it like the kind of tenants who put their fists through the sheetrock. The streams are entirely somebody else’s problem.)

Harding says our concept of private property favors pollution. He says the law requires “elaborate stitching and fitting” to adapt to our current perceptions about the commons.

(Hardin is setting us up for the next section, “How to Legislate Temperance.” He says we need penalties for behavior that damages the commons. I would have liked to have talked to Hardin. I’m inclined to say it’s all a commons, and in spite of this paper’s seemingly wanting to eliminate commons, wonder if Hardin might not have felt the same. As nearly as I can tell there are two theories of property: “prior appropriation,” first to claim it keeps it, articulated in western American water-rights law; and “universal distribution of created goods,” articulated by the Catholic Church. I favor the latter. Could Hardin have arrived at the idea of making the commons private as an expedient for preserving it until such time as human beings muddle our way to distributing unevenly distributed goods equitably? The essay seems to be of two minds, one which would privatize the commons since people are more careful of what is theirs, and one which would coerce the behavior which would protect the commons.)

Population is the problem.

(But we’re stuck with it, barring die-off.)

Hardin’s grandfather (Hardin was born in 1915) told him that flowing water purifies itself every ten miles, but greater population overloads natural recycling processes. This calls for a redefinition of property rights.

(Something else that stretches Hardin’s grandfather’s ten miles of river is human ingenuity, which invents tougher wastes for the river to treat.)

Tragedy Of The Commons II, Freedom In A Commons

Today's illustration is a portrait of Gregory Bateson and a quote from one of his letters. It's meant as a comment on the seventh paragraph below, the one that ends "freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

This is the first section in Tragedy after the introduction. It’s headed “Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons.”

The first paragraph in this section is complicated. Hardin says the rebuttal to “the invisible hand” argument is “to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (from) 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd.”

Hardin calls it the “tragedy of the commons,” and says he is using the word “tragedy” as Whitehead (A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Mentor, NY, 1948) used it and quotes him: “ ‘The essence of tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless workings of things.’” Hardin: “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.” It’s futile to escape from the consequences of our actions. Fire burns, bees sting, you fall if you jump off a bridge.

We’re supposed to picture a “pasture open to all,” where each herdsman keeps as many cattle as possible. Various factors -- conflict, poaching, disease -- keep human and bovine numbers below carrying capacity. When these factors abate, “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.” In other words when conflict, poaching, and disease no longer limit human and animal numbers, the numbers crash the commons.

Each herdsman rationally tried to maximize his gain. If the herdsman adds one animal he gets all the benefit from that animal’s meat or sale. The land is overgrazed by one animal, but that cost is distributed among all the herdsmen, so he comes out ahead.

A rational herdsman can’t help but add more animals, but everybody who uses the pasture comes to the same conclusion, so they add a lot more animals. Each herdsman is locked into a system that “compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited.” Hardin says, “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Hardin believes we learned that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” thousand of years ago, but “natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial.” The individual benefits even as his society suffers. Education can correct the tendency to do the wrong thing, but the lesson needs to be refreshed over and over.

Hardin refers to an incident in which a city government facing increased demand for parking at Christmas time mistakenly re-instituted the commons by placing bags over its parking meters. He come back to parking meters later in the essay, calling them a way of legislating temperance.

The logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, “perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property.” He says that understanding needs to be generalized. He mentions western cattlemen’s pressuring the Bureau of Land Management to increase head limits on federal land, and maritime nations’ over-fishing international waters.

He gives the limited National Park System and increased visitor loads two paragraphs, one describing the wear that visitors cause, and another offering suggestions.

* Sell the Parks;

* Entry based on wealth (make fees exhorbitant);

* Entry based on merit (only approved scholars, scientists, and artists admitted);

* Entry based on lottery;

* Entry based on position in a queue.

He believes these are all objectionable solutions, but that we must choose or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our national Parks.

Tragedy Of The Commons, First Section

I’ve been taking pictures, trying to catch a sense of the urgency of the population problem, to find visual images that illustrate Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons. One day, I drove to the far edges of suburban sprawl and saw with my eye what I wanted to show, but not with my camera. There the problem was that the landscape was a patchwork of development devastating the countryside, an atmosphere whose appeal is undeniable, even so, evidenced by the expense and inconvenience many commit to living in it. Another day, I went to downtown Minneapolis, where there is an uninterrupted built environment, little of nature’s hand, and starker evidence of human habitation. It looked cold to me, but my prejudice is that urban density is a better strategy for housing a population that’s too large. Besides that, I found the city made for more interesting pictures. I thought of De Chirico’s paintings, and especially of the films of Michaelangelo Antonioni, particularly L’Eclisse. In L’Eclisse, the modern Roman settings represent a world that traps the characters, and thwarts what is good and joyous in them, but Antonioni's Rome is heartbreakingly beautiful.

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons begins by raising the possibility of a class of problems without technical solutions. Hardin uses the example of the game of tick-tack-toe to show that the class of problems without technical solutions is not a “null class.”

(In tick-tack-toe, “X” gives “O” the slightest chance of winning by playing a corner. “O” answers a corner opening with a center mark, a center opening with a corner mark, and an edge opening with a corner, or the center. Both players proceed from the opening according to a list of eight priorities. If nobody makes a mistake, the game ends in a draw. Simple computers are unbeatable, and Sam and I had our heads handed to us, for a quarter a game, by a chicken at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City. Tick-tack-toe has no technical solution.)

The population problem as conventionally conceived is a member of the class without technical solution. People who consider the problem of overpopulation often imagine that the world’s carrying capacity can be increased technologically. Hardin says no. Population increases geometrically or exponentially, while production increases arithmetically. (He’s quoting Thomas Malthus.) In a finite world, per capita share of the world’s goods must decrease. The Earth is practically finite, and a finite world can only support a finite population.

So... Population growth must eventually stop. Hardin asks can we achieve the greatest good for the greatest number, and answers no.

Mathematically, he says it is impossible to maximize for more than one variable at once, so we can only maximize population by limiting welfare. He says we need about 1600 maintenance calories a day. If we farm, operate jackhammers, or read cheap novels, we need additional calories. Culture goes out the window.

Writing a decade before the Three Mile Island meltdown, Hardin considered the possibility of an infinite source of energy. He says that this would replace the problem of acquisition with the problem of dissipation. (Couldn’t we just make energy until we need glasses?)

He says that our optimum population is less than our maximum population. What is optimum? He said it would take “generations of hard analytical work, and much persuasion” to answer that question.

What is the maximum good per person? It’s hard to say because people want different things. Incommensurables can’t be compared, but in real life, Hardin says, there are no incommensurables. Natural selection commensurates the incommensurable, using survival as the criterion. “Man must imitate this process.”

We do, but unconsciously. “Explicit decisions make controversy.” “The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighing.” We know we still need to do this because there isn’t a prosperous population on the planet that has had a growth rate of zero for a significant time.

(The problem with unconsciously commensurating the incommensurable is that it happens too slowly for individual lives, or our current crisis. This essay is half a lifetime old.)

Here’s the part that will piss a lot of people off. Hardin says that “We must exorcise” belief in Adam Smith’s (1776) notion that an individual who “ ‘intends only his own gain’ ” is “ ‘led by an invisible hand to promote...the public interest.’ ” If Smith -- and our interpretation of Smith -- is correct, Hardin says, we can trust people to limit our population. If the idea of the “invisible hand” isn’t correct, we need to “examine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.”

Reading Hardin's The Tragedy Of The Commons

Everybody should read Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons. It gets used occasionally to make a case for something or other, most commonly that many marginal excesses will exhaust a common resource. I’ve also heard a utility spokesman seem to use it to say that commons like the atmosphere should be privately held, because responsibility comes from ownership. You could take that from it, but making a case for owning the sky because you're currently polluting it is pretty brassy.

Hardin wrote Tragedy in the late sixties, about population. He makes a case for society’s having an interest in how enthusiastically families breed. He talks about freedom, and “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” but even he hints that population is only a special case, and that his essay is about more.

What is the “tragedy of the commons”? It is that individuals “rationally” maximizing their own gains from a common resource inevitably ruin the resource.

Instead of one long essay of mine, I’ll post my notes outlining Hardin’s paper, one section per day, along with some comments or clarification where they seem needed. You can read the original paper here, along with a friendly objection.