Evironmental Classics Week 5: “The Tragedy of the Commons”

In The Tragedy of the Commons Garret Hardin argues that the problem of overpopulation is one that cannot be solved with technical solutions. He suggests that the way to solve the overexploitation of shared resources, the general class of problem to which he asserts overpopulation belongs, by individuals is either via private or governmental ownership of the resource. But there are several examples to demonstrate that it is not ownership per se that solves the problem. Leaving aside the potential losses such monopolies would produce, private and government owners have often used their resources in unsustainable ways, even if they are not immediately detrimental to their net productivity.

Social norms exert a powerful influence over groups of people. They can influence what and how much we eat, how many children we have, and thereby demonstrate major impacts on our environmental impact. For example, in India, vegetarianism is much more common than in the United States. The US has norms of food, and particularly meat, consumption which result in a much larger ecological footprint. A factor to consider which may more directly affect population growth would be norms around sexual behavior, particularly homosexuality. In societies with strong expectation of parenthood and condemnation of homosexuality, many individuals who might otherwise not reproduce end up as parents.

The division of resources is also quite significant. Class plays a major role in resource allocation for all societies. In particular, scarce resources are frequently claimed as the prerogative of the powerful. Restricting entitlements to a smaller group of people does limit the ecological damage of overconsumption and raises a conflict of social values in an egalitarian society with a strong sense of entitlement. Consequently, attempts to increase equality by spreading the rights of an elite class more broadly without dilution may also result in a rise in the rate of resource depletion.

The interplay between norms and their context are also quite relevant to resource and environmental issues. In a social context the play between technology and norms occurs in matters such as birth control and sexual liberation, where trends in one area cyclically reinforce trends in the other. Norms and the environment also inter-relate, so that a sense of entitlement under norms developed in one environment can lead to resource depletion in another, such as the collapse of the Greenland Norse population and the damage to Norse Iceland’s soil. With different social groups exercising different norms, which may be individually reasonable, competing senses of entitlement can result in resource depletion or environmental damage, such as overfishing in contested waters.

Finally, it is tempting to look back over our history and say that social arrangements spontaneously develop to address problems such as population growth before they become dangerous to society as a whole, but this ignores lessons to be learned from other civilizations. Consider the Greenland Norse, the Easter Islanders, and Sub-saharan Africa, the first two managed to run themselves into ecological disasters which destroyed their civilizations, while parts of the third seem to be validating the claims of Malthus. Social restraints on ecologically dangerous activities are relevant and will not take care of themselves.

I did not have a clear vision of everything I wanted to say when I started it, and it would definitely benefit from a revision, but I have other classes that need my attention. At least I’m finishing it with 2+ hours to spare, rather than 2+ minutes this week.