Garrett Hardin — American biologist, philosopher, and eugenics supporter.
In 1968, he publishes “The Tragedy of the Commons”, in which Hardin makes the case for humans as creatures whose individual drives for resources ultimately collapses the collective good. He uses the example of grazing land, where farmers send their cows to graze on the best land available, regardless of whether that use of that land is needed. The urge to do so stems from the fear that other farmers will take that land first, leaving only behind sub-par trimmings. With this very legitimate concern being held by every farmer, a cycle of overgrazing and overconsumption begins, leading to an inevitable ecological collapse within the community. The migratory farmers move onto the next parcel of land, ready to begin all over again. This is what Hardin states is the “tragedy of the commons”.
This article would go on to be one of the mostly widely dispersed and cited articles in the publication history of Science.
I do not believe Garrett Hardin. He is a hack.
For all the citations and rekindlings of the article, there is diminutive evidence to show that there is any real-world basis of the example he provides. Hardin actually ignores what happens in the history of the commons, the pre-Industrial cooperatively owned grazing communities in England that he refers to. Jane Cox in Environmental Ethics puts together a picture of the commons, that these grazing communities and the use of the land were often highly regulated by the people that used it, as opposed to an external political force that provided top-down direction. Both the types and numbers of each animal that were allowed to graze were limited by a collectively agreed upon amount in recognition of the limited carrying capacity of the land.
Similarly governed community institutions have been found across the globe, and have been the life’s work of American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize In Economics in 2009 for her research in economic governance, especially in shared communal resource pools, such as the commons. Her field research in the management of pasture by locals in Africa and irrigation systems management in villages of western Nepal, show the breadth and depth of multifaceted institutions humans create on their own to self-regulate the environment’s limited resources without devastation.
Hardin’s article was not done on the basis of facts or truth, or even a desire to promote ecological equality. Hardin used this untrue, fictitious parable to further his own eugenicist brand of thinking — that because global resources are finite, and people are prone to overuse, the only way to keep our future intact is to limit not the overconsumption of resources, but to limit who the users of resources are.
In 1974, Hardin publishes another article, this time titled: “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor”. He postulates the existence of a boat carrying fifty people, with room for ten more to come aboard. The boat is surrounded by a hundred swimmers, with the question in hand being to accept more individuals onto the boat or not. He states that to allow all the hundred swimmers on board would spell certain doom for the lifeboat, and that in this model, the hundred and fifty on the lifeboat is akin to the threat of overpopulation that plagues resource security. He also links the lifeboat to rich Western nations such as the United States, while linking the swimmers to poorer countries in Asia and Africa. He makes the case against immigration systems for rich nations, disparaging letting immigrants into the country, out of concern of the “limited carrying capacity” of the lifeboat.
This article, like the one before it, holds little truth or evidence for its claims. Hardin suggests that overpopulation becomes a viable threat because there is not enough to go around. Hardin ignores that in reality, the threat to resource security is not caused by overconsumption stemming from an equitable amount of consumption by too many people, but instead, overconsumption of resources is caused by an extremely select amount of the population that consume far in excess to anyone else.
To view this in the real world, simply take the most base issue of overconsumption on a lifeboat, food security. While problems in food security are commonly linked to food shortages, this claim is spurious at best. There at most three countries with true food shortages, with all other countries with food security issues having issues in their distribution systems of food. Take India, for example, who carries a staggering 200,000 calories per person per day food surplus, yet has the second highest number of malnourished people in the world. While there are programs set up to distribute grain (and kerosene) to the poor, who are at the highest risk of food insecurity, it is estimated nearly 40% of that aid is never seen by those people, due to governmental inefficiencies and corruption.
Hardin ignores these facts to create a flawed perception that plagues too many thinkers today. His writings are filled with virulent, racist, and incorrect statements on the problems facing the world. His writing is used not to bring about justice out of the concern for the environment, but used instead to justify ugly and hateful positions that ultimately call for the State to eliminate what he deems as lesser creatures from the gene pool. He calls for an end to protecting human rights of these lesser creatures, stating “…if we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
However, there is no truth to be found in his thinking. The tragedy of the commons is an aside, a way to cast blame from the true issues facing resource security, to instead forge a narrative basely untrue on both ethical and scientific grounds.
Our climate crisis today is not a result of the tragedy of the commons. There are a multitude of ways to show that we are not near resource insecurity due to a mass of people, but due to an inequitable distribution of resources due to a select few institutions. Despite what Hardin would have you believe, the real problem is not the individual consuming fossil fuels in their car driving from their house to their grandmother’s in Albany and the solution is not to let poor, population-dense island countries drown under the rising sea level.
There is a climate crisis today and it is well past the date to still be mulling over solutions — but this wasn’t always the case for crises in the environment. Before lobbyists and interest groups began to be exercise their freedom to use money in an unfettered way to influence politics, we were able to diagnose and remedy pending ecological disasters in ways nearly invisible to the average person.
Take for example, the 1975 interest in the “ozone hole” that began to appear to be prominent in the Antarctic. This hole in the ozone layer spurred fears that other similar holes might start to appear over areas of population, exposing millions of people to the harmful ultraviolet rays of the Sun that the ozone layer protects against. Governments across the nation were able to quickly and decisively take action in little more than a decade, establishing the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. This agreement, from 197 countries, has reduced the use of ozone depleting substances by 97% and according to the Global Environment Facility, has the ozone layer to fully recover by mid-century, all in a way that has not had any costs on the quality of life for nations that engaged in the use of ozone depleting substances.
Take this against the stark reality that we now face against Western multi-billion dollar institutions with access to the policy makers of the nation in the form of lobbyists, rising to great prominence since the 1970's. It now stands today as a $9 billion industry, despite the efforts of such institutions to obscure their spending in forms that are not required to be reported to government organizations responsible for fiscal transparency.
It was just 2005, where Phillip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute resigned from his position as the White House’s Chief of Staff for the Council of Environmental Quality less than two days after it was found out he had directed the editing of reports on greenhouse gases in a way to suggest a doubtful link between said gases and global warming. Phillip Cooney was hired four days after his resignation by ExxonMobil, a company with a long history of funding climate change denial groups, even going so far as to start their own, despite being the first ones to establish a link between greenhouse gases and climate change, long before any other research institute had even thought it. In 1989, Exxon founded the Global Climate Coalition, an organization dedicated to putting questions towards the scientific consensus on climate change. This group was especially prominent in the 1998 Kyoto Conference, a series of talks held by the international community to come to a treaty regarding the control of greenhouses gases. The influence of this group eventually convinced the United States, China, and India to not sign, countries that account for a large plurality of greenhouse gas emissions today.
Our future is being taken from us — not by the people who consume, but by those who use the power gotten from their ransacks of the ecological sphere, who dump their earnings into the denial of their actions and consequences, misinforming and duping not only those at the policy level, but to the average laypeople, who have been ingrained through duplicitous messaging that the question of climate change hasn’t been answered already. To the rest of us who haven’t been duped, we are locked in a position where the alternatives of fossil fuel consumption and like-minded industries have been stolen from us, and our participation in an unjust society is by coercion, not by choice.
The effort and focus on curbing individual behaviors by climate activist groups are not bad. These efforts are good and founded on solid ethical and scientific grounds. However, these efforts have the cost of not aiming vitriol in the right place or direction. There are enough people already on the side of the truth to make it that our fight is not against those who have been tricked and are positioned to be powerless by definition, but instead, should be directed towards our leaders, our policy makers, and those who are able enact sustainable and scalable change that goes beyond shifting the blame on poor farmers in outer-market regions. As it stands today, our options are limited by design by those in power. The power in mass mobility is not to reduce our collective consumption, but instead to make sweeping changes for all, even those who exist outside of the mobilized force.
71% of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere can be tracked to just 100 companies.
People inherently are good. We should be able to believe the good intentions of one another, and hope for the future by placing trust in each other, despite what Garrett Hardin would tell you. Ask Jane Cox, or Elinor Ostrom, or what the history of those commons we were all so warned about would say.
The necessary political capital today exists to strike fear into the hearts of shilling oil companies and thieves of the future. Movements like the Climate March and even our past actions to mobilize quickly to potential ecological disasters like the ozone hole are enduring proof of that we are strong, and already have the ability to steer the passage of our lifeboat ourselves by wresting control back.
We must move past blaming ourselves, move past championing ideas that shift blame to smaller nations, move past everything that is not aimed towards explicitly withdrawing support from our political leaders and undermining those who engage in behavior contrary to our own beliefs.
The oppressors that cause our infighting love nothing more than to see the debate on climate change continue among the crowd. It’s what they’ve wanted all along — by pouring efforts into fueling winning the debate on climate control, we are only playing right into their hands.
Until we realize who the enemy is that we’re fighting — we’ll never move fast enough to avert what we already know.
