A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 43
43rd of a series
They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.- Anonymous
And so, all these weeks later, we have come full circle, back to the idea that a river is the ultimate commons – owned by no one and used by everyone – with the unavoidable result being “ruin to all.” This, at least, is the message of Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons.”
Published 56 years ago, the essay has had an enormous influence on public thinking and policy making, ranging from resource allocation to social justice, from immigration to environmental protection to water.
Employing the image of a village’s communal grazing land in medieval England, Hardin’s tragedy is simply summarized:
The pasture is open to all.
It is to each herdsman’s benefit to graze as many cows as possible.
Therefore, the pasture must collapse from overgrazing.
We see examples of this everywhere, and nowhere more than in our streams and rivers, as we remove their water in unsustainable quantities and pollute much of what’s left. We know we can’t keep doing this forever, and yet, Hardin writes, we cannot do otherwise because “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited.” As we consider the future of water – or climate change or politics or war – how often do we feel powerless in the face of forces we can’t control?
But think for a moment. How can it possibly be in our self-interest to destroy the very thing on which our well-being depends? What is the “system” that locks us into inevitable ruin? Why do we have to advance helplessly toward our own destruction?
What if Hardin was wrong?
When historian Susan Jane Buck Cox looked at the history of medieval England, the commons she saw looked nothing like Hardin’s image. It actually worked well. The herdsmen seem to have figured out what would happen if they let everyone do what they wanted – and so, unencumbered by Hardin’s theory, they joined together to regulate their commons. “Perhaps what existed in fact,” Cox writes, “was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph.”
Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying how people around the world manage their communal and natural resources. From Asian forests to Maine “lobster gangs,” she recorded data and talked to participants. What she discovered was an almost endless variety of ways communities work together to ensure the long-term sustainability of their commons. Her method of letting the theory emerge from the facts, rather than the other way round, led to Ostrom’s law: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can also work in theory.” In 2009 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
In the end, Hardin’s pasture is not a commons at all; it’s only some grass waiting to be exploited. Nor are his herdsmen members of a community; they’re proto capitalists trying to stick it to their neighbors. In the short run, this may be good for a few of them; it’s hard to see how it’s good for anyone in the long run. Far from the tragedy of the commons, Hardin has depicted the tragedy of unfettered capitalism, where the only motivation is short-term self-interest and the only value is economic. For too long that is how we have treated our rivers and their water. We need to stop.
We live in a nation where private property is enshrined in our Constitution and in our culture. It has no place in our commons. It's time to restate the argument:
The commons is open to all.
It is in everyone’s interest to protect it.
Therefore, ruin is not inevitable.