Tragedy of the Commons, Etc

George Rebane

[This bi-weekly commentary aired tonight on KVMR FM89.5.  Dr Hardin has been one of my lifelong teachers of social thought, the good fortune of which I had to run into him while still in my twenties.  I highly recommend him to your attention; today his ideas are more important than ever.  This piece is adapted from the SESF Numeracy Nuggets series.]

Garrett Hardin, the late professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara, was an ecologist and world-class thinker.  His long list of original ideas and writings pricked many sacred sentiments of the right and left.  Hardin was concerned with population growth and the kinds of decisions required in a world with too many people – kind of like the decisions we are pondering here in Nevada County.  ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, first published in 1968, is his best-known legacy.

In one version, the concept is introduced in terms of ten farmers whose cows graze on a commons or public pasture.  Each farmer has ten cows whose milk provides him with a major part of his income.  The hundred cows fill the carrying capacity of the commons in that the grass is able to grow just fast enough to keep the 100 cows well fed.  Then the spontaneous addition of one new cow by one farmer leads to a runaway addition of more cows as the other farmers also seek the added benefits of a larger herd. But soon all realize that they must keep adding cows just to maintain their shrinking income as their milk production plummets because the cows no longer have adequate food from the over-grazed commons.  

This story illustrates the inevitable fate of any finite resource that 1) is not managed, and 2) is held as a commons (belonging to everyone and yet to no one).  The first consumer to violate its carrying capacity gets an immediate but temporary incremental reward.  But the sticky part is that then everyone must jump on the consumption bandwagon or they will lose their ‘fair share’, and then go on losing the more they hold back.  What seals the fate of all valuable commons is that those who hold back, due to altruism or other sensibility, they quickly get punished.  While it lasts, you have to join in, or you get nothing while watching the commons being destroyed.  Such is our pragmatic public morality toward all commons.

Hardin taught that we are surrounded by many kinds of commons – the air we breathe, the river we drink from, the roads we drive on, the industry we sue, and even the cookie jar on the kitchen counter.  Many years ago my wife Jo Ann, who baked a weeks’ worth of cookies every Sunday evening for the kids’ lunches, figured out why the big jar was empty when the kids went to school Wednesday morning.  The jar was a commons.  Dividing the cookies into plastic bags with names on them suddenly made the cookies last all week.  We had eliminated the commons and substituted ownership and personal responsibility – what a concept!  Perhaps in a future peace we’ll look at Hardin’s illuminating insights on how responsibility really works in a society.

Today the obvious fix to social problems is to place the shareable resource into a commons or public ownership, and then attempt its management it with whatever coercive means are needed to conserve the commons. This solution is a little tricky to apply with folks who have gotten used to the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And most people who keep up with world news know that it’s near impossible to preserve any commons in autocracies (witness the late USSR) or in poor countries (witness most of Africa).  At this point we might ask what commons have we set up here in Nevada County, and how will their fate affect the quality of our lives.

I’m George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com.  The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Comments

[RL Crabb]

The first thing that comes to mind for Nevada County is water. It brings to mind the old saying about the west; "whiskey's for drinkin', water's for fightin' over." We've had this discussion before, George, when debating the future of development in Northern California. Although NID and state agencies claim we are water-rich, I forsee a day when the state demands more than their share of the half-full cup. Just wait until the next inevitable drought.

As much as we'd like to remain rugged individuals, the fact is that we are dependent on the rest of the country and world for everything we touch, from the computers we communicate with to the food we eat. The concept of local sustainability only goes so far.

As far as population growth, some of the worries have been overestimated, in my estimation. As more nations develop, the number of children decreases, as we have seen in Europe and Japan. The trend seems to be headed in that direction in India as well, as women choose careers over families.

[Russ Steele]

We maybe on the cusp of the next Grand Minimum on the sun, with fewer sun spots for the next two 11 year cycles. During the Dalton Minimum in the 1800s California experienced a 13 year drought. During the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950–1250 we had a 200 year drought when trees grew in many of the Sierra lakes. Those trees were 80-120 years old.

The real problem is that the population of California toilet flushers keeps growing be we are not saving any more water for all those flushers. This is a many made drought.

[Russ Steele]

Opps should read man made drought.

[Steve Enos]

Russia... record heat, record drought, record wildfires... so where is that ice age?

[Russ Steele]

Steve,

It is weather and it is summer in Russia, where they are experiencing unusual weather. It is winter in the southern hemisphere and has turned brutally cold In Bolivia with 6 million dead fish, alligators, turtles and dolphins all floating down Bolivian rivers, a cruel aftermath of extreme cold in South America. Argentina is importing record amounts of energy to combat the coldest winter in 40 years. Temperatures in parts of Argentina fell below those of Antarctica on July 15. Peru declared a state of emergency amid plunging temperatures across much of the South American as the country plummet to a 50-year low - predicted to fall further in coming weeks.

Here is YouTube video showing the masses of dead fish in Bolivian rivers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWIzUwZ1Spk&feature=player_embedded

As we transition from a warm phase climate to a cool phase climate there will be weather extremes. There has been in the past and their will be in the future. Interesting to note that San Diego, LA and San Francisco had a record breaking cool July. Did you hear about it on the news? I did not think so, it does not fit the AGW agenda. Hear about the cold weather in South America in the news? I did not think so.

[Dave C]

Friends of mine near Queenstown, NZ tell me they recently recorded their 3rd coldest day in 139 years.
-7C or about 19F. They also said Fox Glacier is advancing at the rate of about 3 feet per week, while its neighbor the F. Josef glacier is advancing at about 2 feet per DAY. Both of these glaciers are on the south island.

[Russ Steele]

Dave,

We visited the Franz Josef glacier in 2003 and it was static, not advancing, only receding under a very slow melt. They had sign posts making the decline history. It started receding in the 1800s long before the SUVs and CO2 were an issue.

[Michael Anderson]

Weather...M.

[Kim Pruett]

Steve and Russ,
There is no doubt that we are seeing evidence of unusual cooling and warming paterns in our climate all over the globe, but this type of thing has been going on for millions of years and in my opinion is not due to human activity but due to mother nature doing what it does and no amount of human activity is going to change that...no matter how much we reduce our green house emmisions, it is still going to happen. So why change our entire economy based on something we cannot control? I do beleive that we should try and conserve and take care of our natural resources and take care of the earth but not at human expense. We used to use our natural resources in abundance and when we did that we had more of a "balance"

[Nate Beason]

George- I was priviledged to be a student of Garrett Hardin. The bulk of his thinking in the sixties has been validated by subsequent events in much of the world. A guy named Norman Bourlag mitigated the impact on one hand, and fortified Hardin's thinking on the other.

Nate Beason