Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy Of The Commons

The “Tragedy of the Commons” is an inevitable result of human nature coined by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 article of the same name. In the article Hardin reports that open resources such as game animals or rivers, “commons”, will be destroyed due to natural human selfishness by the individual. This is clear in the case of overfishing in Peru, for example, which environmental historian Gregory Cushman discusses in his book on Peruvian fishing industries. Hardin provides two solutions: either privatization or mutual coercion agreed upon by those most affected. Due to globalization the people who are most affected are far too diverse to collectively agree to cut back on consumption. The cause of over consumption no longer lies upon the

The resources will dramatically decrease in the case of open shared resources or “commons”. Hardin insists this is due to the fact that each person will act selfishly and thus gain a benefit to themselves greater than the cost to themselves. Through the shared cost of a commons each person contributes slightly to its destruction and with the growing population of humans at the same rate of consumption, the human race will eventually lose that particular resource. Hardin then presents his solutions which are privatization or “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority affected.” In the case of privatization of a commons, all of the cost is placed on one entity which would cause that entity to value the commons enough to exploit it carefully. Mutual coercion would work almost as a reverse commons. Each person takes less of the resource immediately in order to preserve the commons for future benefit. This mutual coercion is not a plausible solution in our current time

Instead corporations supported by global governments have replaced the average consumer as the direct user of natural resources. Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” has wrongly blamed the selfish individual for using up the commons when the individual has been crowded out of the process for decades. Hardin’s solutions of mutual coercion is greatly hindered by the politics between corporations, The “majority affected” that are the ones who are to come to a consensus are made up of corporations being held up by various