The Tragedy of the Commons

I can't take credit for inventing that title. The attribution must go to ecologist Garret Hardin who wrote a paper in 1968 describing what happens when many people use a resource that none of them own.

The term 'Commons' goes back to Medieval England and has a different context to the open access definition referred to by Hardin. All land in England was owned by the King who parceled it out to the various nobility in exchange for support and favours. The Lord of the Manor would take some land for his personal use - forests for hunting etc. and lease the remainder to villagers known as commoners. The rights to use the Commons was strictly controlled by the Lord, who, along with a committee of tenants, granted rights to grow crops, graze animals and to the poorest commoners, to glean after harvest. Rules about use were strictly enforced with penalties including fines and loss of access. The commoners of course paid the Lord for their use of his land.

English Grazing land in 2007. Would have look similar in 19th Century (minus the smokestacks)

Starting in about 1750, the process of 'enclosures' began where the commoners were allowed to have exclusive rights to their allotments, effectively ending feudalism and ushering in the era of private land ownership that we take for granted today. Once a farmer had the assurance that any improvements that he made to his land would be exclusively to his benefit, productivity increased. Some commoners would sell their allotment to others thus began the increase of farms to larger and more economical units, and released labour from the countryside to man the factories of the emerging Industrial Revolution.

Hardin refers to a pasture where cows owned by many people are allowed to graze. If one of the users adds a cow to his herd, he gains an immediate advantage over the others who soon follow by adding cows of their own  until overgrazing occurs and they all suffer. The type of commons referred to by Hardin is an 'open commons' with absolutely no ownership by an individual or group, so all management had to be collaborative or coercive.

Hardin also referred to pollution where the pollutor could dump toxic waste into the commons and gain all of the benefit, while the remainder of society bore all of the costs. If there is no cost to pollute, then pollution will increase until the commons is destroyed.

This seems so obvious it seems odd that it took until 1968 before anyone wrote a paper on the subject and made themselves famous although this had been discussed as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Hardin said that the way to prevent mis-appropriation of common resources and eventual ruin, was to have strong control and rules. Hardin was also obsessed with the idea that population increase would be the major force that destroyed the commons and he questioned whether people should be allowed the 'breed' without restraint.

A clear illustration of how the commons can be destroyed is a game that has been played in psychology studies many times and always with the same result. Here is a generic version made up by me to keep it simple.

Ten people are asked to anonymously put $10 each (of their own money) into a pot. The game organizer then doubles the pot (with his money) and distributes the proceeds equally among the participants.

Since 10 participant each contributed  $10, the pot is $100, doubled to $200 and divided among the participants they each received $20 for their $10 investment. This was repeated and participants were told that the game would continue indefinitely as long as there was money to distribute. After a few runs, the organizer notices that the pot only contained $90. This is doubled to $180 and each participant receives $18. For the 9 who contributed $10, they still made a profit of $8, but for the one who contributed nothing, he got all of the $18 for himself.

Depending on the group, the game progresses at different rates. Two people decide not to contribute and reap the additional rewards for themselves, than possibly 3, but it always ends the same way. At some point almost as if there was a signal, the holdouts realize that they are being 'suckered' and individually make the decision to cash it. Although these are individual decisions they usually occur simultaneously and when the pot is opened, it is empty. Since doubling $0 gives $0, there is nothing to distribute and the game ends. Everybody loses. If nobody cheated, the game would go on for ever and the participants would gain much more (although I doubt that the funding for the study would actually allow that).

Hardin said that the way to prevent mis-appropriation of commons and eventual ruin, was to have strong control and rules - he used the term mutually agreed coercion. I thought that this made total sense and was surprised to read the strong backlash. This was at the height of the Cold War and use of regulation to coerce was seen as a form of socialism by conservatives especially in the United States. Rather than regulate, conservatives thought that the way to solve the problem was through increased privatization. But how do you privatize the Ocean, or a River or the Earth's Atmosphere?

The example of the English Commons was extensively used to illustrate the advantages of privatization in dealing with land and grazing. Certainly the proprietor has a vested interest in making his land sustainable since he reaped all of the rewards -  removing the need to manage and mediate between many greedy interests. This is the root of our very successful Capitalist Economic System.

Another solution was proposed by Elinor Ostrom (she got a Nobel Prize for Economics). The solution was named Polycentric Governance which simply means that rather than rules and coercion handed down by a central authority, the actual users of the Commons create and enforce the rules themselves. This would apply only where sole proprietorship was impossible.

She outlined several areas where this had been successfully achieved - water and irrigation management in California and several third world countries, coastal fisheries management in many countries with a strong emphasis on the inshore Cod Fishery in Newfoundland. She (an American) documented fishing communities in remote bays of Newfoundland. The fishermen created and enforced rules to prevent overfishing in their isolated bay. This paper was published in 1990 and in 1992, two years later, the Cod Fishery collapsed. What Ostrom missed was so gaping that maybe I should get a Nobel Prize for pointing out that Cod are migratory and live and feed mostly in the open ocean outside of the control of these wonderfully co-operative folk. In other words her definition of this Commons was too narrow.

Outside of the cosy world of the inshore fishers, the industrial trawlers and factory ships were raking the sea bed, destroying habitat and using the small fish at the bottom of the food chain as foodstock and fertilizer. Fisheries scientists who tried to raise the alarm were silenced. The large fishery companies carried out their own studies that showed that all was fine. The politicians used the specter of job losses to justify not taking action. In the end, the collapse took 35,000 fishers and plant workers out of work and required millions of dollars from the Federal Government for compensation and retraining. 22 years later, the inshore Cod fishery still has not recovered to the point that a commercial inshore fishery can be re-opened.

Most simple and convenient definitions of a commons are flawed. It would be difficult to imagine any ecological system that is so isolated that it can me managed without harm to some other entity. An enclosed field may appear to be such a system, but spraying insecticides can have impact on honeybees and birds that are not really part of simplistic view of a closed system. Of course we always take the anthropomorphic view of everything and describe the harm done in terms of people and economics. By doing this, we discount the impact on non human species and the planet in general.

Most of the world's systems are interconnected and not isolated. The largest, most important and currently the most vulnerable commons, the Earth's Biosphere cannot be privatized and cannot be managed by small groups of well meaning farmers and fishers.

For most of human history the commons seemed infinite and inexhaustible. How quickly things have changed in the last century. Within a few generations the biosphere has been overwhelmed by an expanding and increasingly voracious Homo Sapiens.

 You wouldn't pee in your swimming pool so why is it OK to do this to my air?

 The tragedy of the commons usually refers to taking something out of a shared resource ... like grass for grazing, water from artesian wells, fish from a pond so why am I extending it to putting something in  ... like atmospheric pollution. The same logic prevails. The global Climate Change negotiations reveal how countries jockey to gain some advantageous position before things get really bad and there is no choice but to try to protect their own skins. The same greedy rhetoric is used and the same denials are presented to delay action.

I know that I'm being naive. We must have electricity, we need some manufactured goods and transportation is essential for our civilization but the commons belongs to all not to those who profit by using it for free.

The tragedy of the Commons is that some benefit from it's use and all suffer when it is destroyed.

I am generally pessimistic. We as a species have managed to pull some commons back from the brink. An example is the Great Lakes. Ownership was taken by the 2 friendly countries that had exclusive jurisdiction and regulations or as Hardin called it mutually agreed coercion . This was possible because the boundaries and jurisdiction were clearly defined and it had become obvious that harm to one was harm to all. The same cannot be said for global commons like the Oceans and the Atmosphere. I believe that it will be impossible to get agreements to prevent the destruction of our global commons as there are so many diverse players with wildly differing agendas.

I fear for the future of my grandchildren and I feel guilt that I am a part of the problem and am actually doing very little about it. I drive a car, heat my house, fly in aircraft and consume all sort of stuff that I don't need.

Now if I could only find my my Granddaughter's copy of the Lorax and if only everyone would read it again maybe we could be inspired by Dr Seuss' simplistic but powerful fable.