Honorable Forum:
Though I read the paper at the time and was most impressed, I have forgotten
the details and no longer have a copy. Same for Lynn T. White's "The
Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (Science, Vol 155 (Number 3767),
March 10, 1967, pp 1203-1207). These two papers mark my second dropping out
of academic studies and living in the outermost house I could find to do my
"Walden" thing, only to whimper back to civilization after a year of eating
of the weeds of the field. Since then I have been struggling to make sense
out of my 1955 declaration to try to "reconcile the needs and works of
humankind with those of the earth and its life." It ain't easy, and I have
not yet decreed my efforts to have been more than marked with more failures
than successes. For most of those years I have been working on writing and
rewriting various "essays" such as "Culture Against Society," "Advancing
Toward Eden," "Backing Off From Utopia," "The Corporate Feudal State" and
similar heretical stuff. And yeah, I gave a paper a couple of decades or so
ago (title forgotten, copy lost) that said in part, "It's no accident that
ecology and economics have a common root." I went on to say something to the
effect that ecology was "house-logic" while economics was "house-numbers." A
room (a Victorian hotel in Berkeley) full of ecologists made no comment.
Like most of us, I have many betters and mentors to thank, including people
on this list as well as writers like these two gentlemen. I don't think
anyone goes it alone, nor does anyone come to a new fork in the intellectual
shrub without recognizing the value of those who have gone before and are
forging ahead. I will never "finish" these "essays." That would be contrary
to the whole concept of intellectual enquiry and a capitulation to that most
powerful of temptations, egocentrism.
So I do not believe that Hardin, White, and all of the other explorers of
this infinite confusion are "wrong," but I have wandered off their path a
bit. With great respect to Hardin, White, and others in quest of the
"answer" to the human dilemma, I have concluded that they simply did not
"go" far enough back in human history. I still have a lot of explaining to
do, but the shortest statement I can make in a listserv post is that I
believe that, while both White and Hardin were right, my version of the
story goes back before the advent of culture itself, which I think of as a
behavioral "tipping point" where a comparatively stable social (cooperative)
behavioral "system" transmogrified itself through success into a
psychopathological "structure" that we call "culture." This behavioral
phenomenon can be thought of as something like a fungus destroying a
bacterial culture in a Petri dish. This biology 101 principle ramped up to
earth-size and multiplied to an uncounted extent, illustrates Hardin's
point, but requires an overlay of White's behavioral assertion cranked back
in time to (and before) the enslavement of plants and animals we call
"domestication," the beginning of culture, the beginning of the supplanting
of cooperative behavior with competitive behavior. Further, I suggest that
while social behavior, far from being snuffed out, is alive and unwell as an
all-too-willing supplicant to a fixed-dominance hierarchy.
Here we find the first major snag--competition. Is it "real" or is it itself
a cultural construct?
I'm past my self-imposed limit on listserv posts already, so I'll stop. But
I welcome critiques and other ideas. After all, I see this as only one
little piece of a common quest.
WT
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Crants" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 9:03 AM
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Tragedy of the Commons revisited (RE: the precautionary
principle...)
Quick note:
It wasn't accurate for me to characterize the Tragedy of the Commons
(proposed by Garrett Hardin 1968, Science 162: 1243-1248) as an economic
theory, though it is, in part. It is every bit as much an ecological
theory
to explain why over-population is a serious problem and why people should
not be free to breed as much as they please. This origin in the
overpopulation debate would explain why this theory is apparently so much
better-known in ecology and in economics.
The theory has been used to argue for government regulation of open-access
resources, like fish and herps, and also for privatization of property
owned
by the government (national parks, rangelands, etc.) and property owned by
nobody (open ocean). Both applications of the theory have their failings.
As Beryl Crowe (1969, Science166, 1103-1107) argued in a response to the
original paper, government regulation tends to break down because the
broad
coalition that inspires the creation of the regulatory agency is less
interested and less determined than the people the agency is meant to
regulate. Through relentless pressure, the regulated parties eventually
take over the regulating agency, making it an expensive Potemkin
regulator.
Privatization has numerous problems with which most of us are probably
familiar. To name a few:
(1) People don't necessarily manage resources more sustainably on their
own
property than they do on communal property.
(2) Privatization, when it works, works on economically valuable
resources,
and only when the value of those resources accrue to the owners of the
resource disproportionately. The wetland adjacent to the river filters
the
water for people downstream, but not so much for the person who owns the
wetland. The view from your ranchette house is worth more to you than it
costs anyone else to have your house mar the beauty of the natural
landscape.
(3) Privatizing a resource by dividing up the land or water in which it's
found doesn't work so well if that resource is highly mobile, like wild
fish
and birds or clean water..
(4) Private property is the heart of capitalism, and, for all its virtues,
one of the main things capitalism rewards is the prior possession of
wealth.
Privatized resources accrue disproportionately to the wealthy.
Privatizing
public or open-access resources, like fisheries, national parks, and
public
schools, ultimately amounts to handing the best of these resources over to
the wealthy and reducing or eliminating whatever access everyone else once
had.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to correct my assertion that the Tragedy of the
Commons was primarily an economic theory. Someone told me that in my
early
training, and it didn't occur to me to question it until I had echoed that
error to the forum.
Jim Crants
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