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.

Dennis Banks At Wounded Knee

Boffing With Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand with a Boffer. These things were foam swords for working out your aggressions. The theory was that violence is instinctive in us, and we could reduce the real thing by playfully ritualizing it. Brand introduced me to a lot of things through the Whole Earth Catalog, and its descendants, including Boffers — which got my thigh seriously chomped by a friend’s dog. More lately, Brand has introduced me to Steven LeBlanc’s archeological history of human violence, Constant Battles. We’re violent when we exceed carrying capacity.

The Cavalry At Wounded Knee

Maybe Jesus and the Buddha teach us how to be content.

But real oppressors and thieves replace you. That means that they select themselves to shape humanity and the world from now on. I had a 1-O draft deferment during the Viet Nam War, and I was serious, but I can’t be a pacifist anymore. If desire for human peace is hell, the moral thing is to go to hell.

Thomas Merton

I read a good part of this short bio of Thomas Merton while waiting for the auto shop to fix an exhaust leak and some other stuff. Merton was the smart and cosmopolitan scion of American and New Zealand expats. In his twenties he converted to Roman Catholicism, and became a Trappist priest, as well as a hermit who carried on conversations and correspondences with the likes of Aldous Huxley, Brahmachari, and D. T. Suzuki.

I'd read it before, and done some underlining I'd forgotten. Quotes:

"If I pray for peace, that prayer is only justified if it means one thing." -- it had to mean that he himself could sacrifice affluence, the things that made for greed. Just praying for a cessation of war wasn't enough.


"I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing someone somewhere."


"How can I write about poverty when, though I am in a way poor, yet I still live as though in a country club?"


"Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others."


"Biblical eschatology must not be confused with the vague and anxious eschatology of human foreboding."


And in regard to the above foreboding, Now here was Father Louis (Merton) their teacher, telling them that this was a pathological fear, and that such fears were really a thinly disguised hope for violence, a hope for a violent end, in opposition to the true force of eschatology."


He repeated over and over that nonviolence does not make sense "if one does not also have faith in God."


Do I believe that last one, and does it square the earlier statements about poverty? If scarcity is the germ of war, doesn't that make war's elimination a purely practical problem. And what if there is no god.

Peace Can Only Be Won When...

I have three or four strategies for making peace:

   * We must recognize the humanity in each other, and the poignancy of that humanity; recognizing each other as real human beings will make war unthinkable.

   * Cultivate equanimity and contentment; this is taking the example of the lilies of the field to heart.

   * We must live within the carrying capacity of our range -- the planet -- by conservation and invention; violence won't be attractive to people who are living in abundance.

   * Prohibit behaviors by which individuals exceed our shares of carrying capacity.

Interferring Environments

Okay, so McLuhan says that different media are environments that condition us differently. Movable type made mass literacy and individualism possible. Everybody who learned to read exercised new mental muscles. More recently, electronic media -- a new environment -- broadened awareness, tried to pry our noses out of our books.

What happens when we live in multriple environments:

* Our inherited literacy;

* Electronic Media;

* Change in carrying capacity?

Tom Sawyer Fiixes The Shed Himself

I’m not from around here, but I’m a south Minneapolis type: a fairly hale, sixtyish, white man, with bushy gray hair and an untrimmed white beard. You see us in our gardens, at the food co-op, the farmers’ market, and you know, when you do, that you’re looking at a child of privilege -- educated -- and an opponent, in his youth, of the war in Viet Nam. Every one of us geezers voted for a supposedly ineligible presidential candidate, and to a man we promote socialism, homosexuality, and junk science.

It was either because I look like somebody who needs to be set straight about the affairs of the day, or because I was being unusually and conspicuously industrious, that strangers and neighbors kept interrupting me while I was repairing the shed door.

You can see from the pictures that the door’s bottom had a bad case of dry rot. I cut the rot off, and replaced it with a 2x12 piece of Douglas fir that I painted back in April. I screwed the new board onto the door using a particle board splint. Since modern lumber is not as thick as the original door (actually, not as thick as the lumber that the previous owner had used when he made an earlier repair --- compare the right and left doors), I needed to shim between the new board and the splint. I imagined some kind of plastic shim stock readily available at the lumber yard, but struck out. My shims are pieces of plastic Ikea cutting boards, easily cut with a utility knife, and drilled, sandwiched with the splint door and lumber. Construction mostly went according to plan, but sawing the door and fitting the new board were awkward and time-consuming, and I had to do a lot of planing, and move the bolt, after rehanging the door. It was just light out when I locked the shed and went into the house.

My first visitor was an unemployed man of fifty on a bicycle. He was looking to make some money helping. I didn’t say that I was improvising, and figured anything but take-charge expert help would be a liability. I explained that we were starting a business and living on savings, so I couldn’t afford to hire him. He took it well, and spent the better part of the next hour witnessing for Jesus and his Air Force DI father’s parenting style. It’s funny how long some people can go without breathing in. I had my shirt off. The formula for getting vitamin D is to expose your torso for half as long as it would take to get pink. Next time, I’m keeping my shirt where I can reach it.

I’m pretty shy about driving in other people’s alleys. Some people are not, and I always wonder what they’re up to. Visitor number two interrupted a tortoise-like alley joy ride in his Escalade -- the coziest lemming in the stampede -- to see what I was doing. Speaking as a man in his sixty-second summer, I’d say this was an old guy. He told me he was a Korea vet, while I wrestled the door from the pavement where I’d assembled it, back into its slot, and tried unsuccessfully to crowbar and screw it back onto its hinges.

Did you know that members of my generation gave aid and comfort to the enemy during the Viet Nam War, and that it’s necessary that we occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq until the Al Quaida terrorists learn that they’ll be better off working with the modern world than attacking us? Look at China.

Apropos of nothing, my second visitor told me that he didn’t need Social Security or Medicare. He had two-and-a-half million that he could put his hands on today if he needed it, and he was always looking for more rental property (I live next door to a duplex, and across the street from another). He said renters never take care of his property, and I’d be surprised  at how seldom he could return damage deposits. They -- his tenants -- think he’s got it easy, but he’s worked hard all his life. My confidant earned every penny he has.

My third visitor was neighbor Jerry, a guy I like, but I could see the light on the trees getting orange, and the door still wasn’t seating well enough to bolt. I would run my borrowed Craftsman power planer over the high edges, and try again. Sometimes I’d be on my back, underneath the door, with the shavings sticking to the sweat on my face. I was holding the door still by tying it to the fence with a couple half hitches in a length of clothesline. Every cycle of planing and testing meant getting off my back, untying the clothesline, test shutting the door, retying to the fence, then lying down with the planer. It was a dilemma: I needed a break, but I also needed to get the door to seat while I could still see to plane it.

Neither of my first two visitors needed conversation. I nodded and met their eyes, laughed grunted or murmured on cue. The first guy was kind of a bootless soldier, so I let him talk until he ran out and headed on to his next place. The second man really needed another perspective -- and I think we all need somebody to wise up him and his ilk -- but who knows how to give it to him. Humans are capable of seeing their folly and getting better, but I kept wishing he’d go away.

Jerry told me he was nine in ‘52. I was three. He told me about running a store. He sold liquidated products at huge discounts, but marked up several times the little he’d paid for them. Getting started involved getting stuck with a bunch of something in a deal, back in the disco years. A lot of people were selling rugs with pictures on them, pool cues, and socket sets, along Lake Street then, so Jerry tried to unload his stuff there. The cops chased him inside.

About that time, chains like Walgreen's were running Twin Cities family pharmacies out of business. Drug stores sell a lot of stuff, cosmetics, film processing, wading pools. Jerry would make a bid on a store’s entire inventory, saving the retiring owners the headache of selling it one item at a time. It worked out pretty well, and he expanded into furniture and decorative brass.

It wasn’t all French sauces, though. The health department discovered that the infant formula was past its sell-by date, and one of his employees was selling things at extra discounts and pocketing the cash. A group distracted Jerry by pretending to shop for a dinette set, while their friends stole some brass he’d been checking in. Jerry tried to stop another thief, and met with resistance. In the altercation, the thief went through the window, and Jerry faced litigation from the Urban League, who accused him of racism and picketed the store. The thief’s further adventures and subsequent incarceration put the kibosh on the legal action. Jerry said he’s not a racist, and given his clientele, it would have been foolish of him to make it known, were he.

He was getting heat from his insurance company. He’d had a series of break-ins. The thieves would smash his plate glass window and take as much as they could as quickly as they could. He tried replacing the glass with Plexiglas, but they used suction cups to pull the plastic window out of its socket. Thwack! Jerry found a buyer.

The buyer called later to ask about break ins. Jerry said, “Oh, didn’t I tell you about that?”

Jerry’s oldest son is a wheeler-dealer, also. He operates outstate, but has done some work for Jerry. He saved Jerry a lot of money when “this guy that’s kind of a crook” offered Jerry millions of disposable razors, and a truckload of white paint for a very few dollars. The son flew to Phoenix, and discovered that the razors didn’t shave, and it was lead paint.

The son has a nightclub in a resort town north of here, and once owned a lot of real estate up in lake country, living in a crazy mansion, with vacuum cleaners in the walls and a pool in the basement, built by another operator. He keeps churning his money, and drives briefly a succession of two-engined Italian sportscars, and quarter-of-a-million-dollar Mercedeses formerly owned by basketball players. Jerry had two stories about being stopped by the police in cars his son had loaned him. One was a car that was built for the quarter mile at Brainerd (bet that was fun to drive in town), and the other was the round-ball player’s Mercedes, whose windows were too opaque for the constabulary. They towed both cars, and Jerry had to call for rides.

Jerry’s out of the game now. He’s an old fart who spends weekends at the lake, and complains about the birds shitting on his car, a mid-sized rice burner.

The son worries me, though. He’s around fifty, destined to see less money to churn as he ages, and he’s going to see society claim a bigger chunk of his cash flow to pay for fewer services. He'll get stuck with one of those cars, and won't have the cash to make the next deal. It's how civilization discovers the planet’s carrying capacity for a Ferrari-driving species, but he won’t see it that way. There truly are villains and incompetents, but the real problem is the wants of individual billions creating a consensus demand for the impossible and the dangerous.

The face on the working drawing is of Emma, an artist friend.

Telstar And Constant Battles

An interesting idea in Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles is that farmers are harder on a region’s carrying capacity than foragers. Foragers, like the Kalahari’s !Bang or Australia’s various aborigines range over the landscape, picking fruit and vegetables and hunting game. They do eventually exhaust an area, and move on, but the farmer lifestyle is more resource intensive, and farmer populations are larger.

Forager women give birth about every four years. Children nurse longer, nursing depressing fertility, and there are several incentives for limiting family size. Foragers are mobile daily, as they search for food, and groups move periodically. Several small children are harder to tend on the move than one. Beside the logistical problems, children aren’t knowledgeable to be genuine contributors, and are liabilities until puberty or later.

Farm crops require more processing and cooking, and a larger tool kit, so farmers need fuel and materials that foragers don’t. Staying in the same place for generations, farmers deplete soil. LeBlanc documents soil depletion with the history of the Mimbres Valley in the southwestern United States, beginning in the early Common Era, and ending with collapse in the thirteenth of fourteenth century. Farmer populations are larger. Since farmers are sedentary, and since they get more calories out of an area than foragers would, they can afford more children. Ground and cooked grains make good baby foods, so children nurse for less time. There are farm chores that don’t require a lot of knowledge and expertise -- ones that children could do -- so there’s an incentive to reproduce to get more workers. There's an incentive to reproduce, as well, so that someone can take care of you in your dotage.

It might have seemed to early farmers, rubbing shoulders with foragers, that they were the ones who used their resources better. After all, they were providing for more people, living better, and staying in the same place for a long time. In fact, they were mining their soils.

LeBlanc explains the sudden shift from foraging to farming (10,000 years ago in the Middle East, soon after in China, 6,000 years ago in America), not with some teleological inspiration, or people’s recognizing a good idea and embracing it. He says that farming spread because farmers warred on foragers to take their territories, when farmer populations had exceeded their territories’ carrying capacities.

Buckminster Fuller liked to say that we would succeed by “doing more with less.” He called it “ephemeralization.” One example he used was Telstar, the first commercial communications satellite. Fuller said that this quarter-ton sphere replaced thousands of tons of transoceanic cable. I always wondered about the infrastructure supporting the two communications devices: ship versus rocket, steel mill versus transistor factory. Which industries use more water, fuel, noxious chemicals? What changes in society did each communications device inspire, and what were their consequences for the planet’s carrying capacity. Was Fuller correct that Telstar did more with less?

If Telstar did use more of the world’s wealth, I recognize that it could still have been benign. For instance, widespread, rapid, global, electronic communication might be necessary in an Earth which had recently experienced World War II, in which the United States and Soviet Union aimed hydrogen bombs at each other, and in which global commerce was introducing us all to each other. It’s the old conundrum in which you wonder if polio vaccine was worth Madison Avenue.

I wonder if it’s possible for us to find our way to a forager lifestyle, informed by what we’ve learned along the way. The foragers weren’t able to control their populations and stay out of conflict, but they might have, if they’d had our biological and technical knowledge.

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.

Constant Battles Inhumanity And Carrying Capacity

Stewart Brand quoted Steven LeBlanc's Constant Battles in his book Whole Earth Discipline. Now I have another title on my list. LeBlanc is a Harvard archaeologist, and Brand summarizes Constant Battles as showing that, for most our history, we have dealt with the carrying capacities of our ranges by robbing our neighbors, killing them, or enslaving them. In spite of World Wars, we modern people lose about three percent of adult males to war, but over our history we've lost twenty-five percent that way. This rang a bell for me. Napoleon Chignon says this is about what the Yanomamo, an Amazonian people, lose to war.

The Nazis weren't monsters, they were vestiges. If we're not careful, we may see them again, or worse, be them.