Greetings,

No other writer/scientist has had more influence on my thinking than
Hardin. I read his original essay 25 years ago. Perhaps some of you will
appreciate his remarks made last spring. (Sorry for any dupes)

Steve
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ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Extensions of "The Tragedy of the Commons"

Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin is professor emeritus of human ecology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of a dozen books based on many
short papers,the best known of which are "The Tragedy of the Commons" and
"Living on a Lifeboat."

It is easy to call for interdisciplinary syntheses, but will anyone
respond? Scientists know how to train the young in narrowly focused work;
but how do you teach people to stitch together established specialties that
perhaps should not have been separated in the first place? Early in this
century the specialties of biology and chemistry were joined to form
biochemistry; similarly, economics and ecology are now in the process of
being combined into ecological economics. My first attempt at
interdisciplinary analysis led to an essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons."
Since it first appeared in Science 25 years ago, it has been included in
anthologies on ecology, environmentalism, health care, economics,
population studies, law, political science, philosophy, ethics, geography,
psychology, and sociology. It became required reading for a generation of
students and teachers seeking to meld multiple disciplines in order to come
up with better ways to live in balance with the environment.

I did not start out intending to forge an interdisciplinary link, but
rather to present a retiring president's address to the Pacific division of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But even after six
revisions, each quite different from the one before, my summary of an
ecologist's view of the human overpopulation problem would not crystallize.
Repeatedly, I found fault with my own conclusions.

With Adam Smith's work as a model, I had assumed that the sum of separate
ego-serving decisions would be the best possible one for the population as
a whole. But presently I discovered that I agreed much more with William
Forster Lloyd's conclusions, as given in
his Oxford lectures of 1833. Citing what happened to pasturelands left open
to many herds of cattle, Lloyd pointed out that, with a resource available
to all, the greediest herdsmen would gain--for a while. But mutual ruin was
just around the corner. As demand grew in step with population(while supply
remained fixed), a time would come when the herdsmen, acting as Smithian
individuals, would be trapped by their own competitive impulses. The
unmanaged commons would be ruined byovergrazing; competitive individualism
would be helpless to prevent the social disaster.

So must it also be, I realized, with growing human populations when there
is a limit to available resources. The direct psychic gains of parenthood
are offset by economic losses channeled through the whole population. It
was so in Lloyd's day; it is even more so today. I rewrote the essay for
what I thought would be the last time.

But in a final reading to my family and friends at a stopover on our way to
the meeting in Utah, I was encouraged to modify it again. I scribbled in
the changes, most notably the suggestion that the way to avoid disaster in
our global world is through a frank
policy of "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." Under conditions of
scarcity, ego-centered impulses naturally impose costs on the group, and
hence on all its members.

A crude example makes the point: I might like to rob banks, but I am
unwilling to allow other citizens to do so. So most of us, acting together,
pass laws that infringe on the individual's freedom to rob banks. For an
example closer to home, think of what is happening to the freedom to make
withdrawals from the oceanic bank of fishes. In 1625, the Dutch scholar
Hugo Grotius said, "The extent of the ocean is in fact so great that it
suffices for any possible use on the part of all peoples for drawing water,
for fishing, for sailing." Now the once unlimited resources of marine
fishes have become scarce and nations are coming to limit the freedom of
their fishers in the commons. From
here onward, complete freedom leads to tragedy. (And still the shibboleth,
"the freedom of the seas," interferes with rational judgment.)

My address was a success, and the essay was printed 6 months later, trimmed
by half and,
presumably, more appealing in its brevity to a wider audience. The 600
reprints were exhausted in a matter of weeks.

Its message is, I think, still true today. Individualism is cherished
because it produces freedom, but the gift is conditional: The more the
population exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, the more
freedoms must be given up. As cities grow, the freedom to park is
restricted by the number of parking meters or fee-charging garages. Traffic
is rigidly controlled. On the global scale, nations are abandoning not only
the freedom of the seas, but the freedom of the atmosphere, which acts as a
common sink for aerial garbage. Yet to come are many other restrictions as
the world's population continues to grow.

The reality that underlies all the necessary curtailments is always the
same--population growth. Yet the slightest attempt to limit this freedom is
promptly denounced with cries of Elitism! Big-Brotherism! Despotism!
Fascism! and the like. We are slow to mend our ways because ethicists and
philosophers of the past generally did not see that numbers matter. In the
language of 20th-century commentators, traditional thinking was
magnificently verbal and deplorably nonnumerate.

One of today's cardinal tasks is to marry the philosopher's literate ethics
with the scientist's commitment to numerate analysis. Words are important,
but they often
require a numerate cast. What I have realized from reading numerous
criticisms of the theory of the commons is that both Lloyd and I were
analyzing a subset of commons--those where "help yourself" or "feel free"
attitudes prevail. This was the message European pioneers in North America
thought they had been given by the land they chose to perceive as
unpeopled. Even today, laws encouraging private access to public lands for
mining, pasturing, and forestry perpetuate subsidies that support
malfunctioning commons.

Numeracy demands that we take account of the exponential growth of living
systems, while
acknowledging that resources, when thoroughly understood, will prove to be
definable by numbers that are relatively constant. Of course, under the
impact of newscience, the apparent limits of resources may be pushed back
for a while; but finally what E. T.
Whittaker called "impotence principles"*--for example, the laws of
thermodynamics--will exert their influence on policy.

To judge from the critical literature, the weightiest mistake in my
synthesizing paper was the omission of the modifying adjective "unmanaged."
In correcting this omission, one can generalize the practical conclusion in
this way: "A 'managed commons' describes either socialism or the privatism
of free enterprise. Either one may work; either one may fail: 'The devil is
in the details.' But with an unmanaged commons, you can forget about the
devil: As overuse of resources reduces carrying capacity, ruin is
inevitable." With this modification firmly in place, "The Tragedy of the
Commons" is well tailored for further interdisciplinary syntheses.

A final word about interdisciplinary work--do not underestimate its
difficulties. The more specialties we try to stitch together, the greater
are our opportunities to make
mistakes--and the more numerous are our willing critics. Science has been
defined as a
self-correcting system. In this struggle, our primary adversary should be
"the nature of things." As a matter of policy, we must not reply in kind to
those critics who love to indulge in name-calling. (They are all too
numerous in interdisciplinary undertakings.) But critics who, ignoring
personalities, focus on the underlying nature of things are the true
friends of science.
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