By Ian Angus

August 24, 2008 -- Will shared resources always be misused and
overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a
guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatisation the only way
to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most
economists and development planners will answer "yes" — and for proof
they will point to the most influential article ever written on those
important questions.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of
the Commons" has been anthologised in at least 111 books, making it
one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific
journal. It is also one of the most quoted: a recent Google search
found "about 302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons".

For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank discussion
paper, "the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess
natural resource issues" (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6). It has been
used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands,
privatising health care and other social services, giving
corporations ``tradable permits'' to pollute the air and water, and
much more.

Noted anthropologist Dr G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the
article "has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and
professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and
imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other
social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and
knowledge".

Like most sacred texts, "The Tragedy of the Commons" is more often
cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds
authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.

Garrett Hardin hatches a myth

The author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Garrett Hardin, a
University of California professor who until then was best known as
the author of a biology textbook that argued for "control of
breeding" of "genetically defective" people (Hardin 1966: 707). In
his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources
inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth
for all, there is wealth for none.

He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.

(The term "commons" was used in England to refer to the shared
pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources
that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s.
Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and
they still exist today in various forms around the world,
particularly in indigenous communities.)

"Picture a pasture open to all", Hardin wrote. Herders who want to
expand their personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional
grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be
divided among all, but they alone will get the benefit of having more
cattle to sell.

Inevitably, "the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible
course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd". But
every "rational herdsman" will do the same thing, so the commons is
soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no
animals at all.

Hardin used the word "tragedy" as Aristotle did, to refer to a
dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a
character's actions. He called the destruction of the commons through
overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the
inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. "Freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all."

Where's the evidence?

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin's essay, it's shocking to
realise that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping
conclusions. He claimed that the "tragedy" was inevitable — but he
didn't show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-
regulation by the communities involved. One such process was
described years earlier in Friedrich Engels' account of the "mark",
the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-
capitalist Germany:

"[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and
direction of the community …

"Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was
distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of
the `common mark'. The nature of this use was determined by the
members of the community as a whole. …

"At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the
open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment
upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark."
(Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels'
description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of
recent research concludes:

"[W]hat existed in fact was not a `tragedy of the commons' but rather
a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands,
although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land
was managed successfully by communities." (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England
as "stinting" — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs,
sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the
common pasture. Such "stints" protected the land from overuse (a
concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin
arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to
its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading
modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who
deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken
their much poorer neighbours' position in disputes over the enclosure
(privatisation) of common lands (Neeson 1993: 156).

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their
behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world,
small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions
and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons
community survived through good years and bad.

Why does the herder want more?

Hardin's argument started with the unproven assertion that herders
always want to expand their herds: "It is to be expected that each
herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons…
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain."

In short, Hardin's conclusion was predetermined by his
assumptions. "It is to be expected" that each herder will try to
maximise the size of their herd — and each one does exactly that.
It's a circular argument that proves nothing.

Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that
society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who
don't care about the impact of their actions on the community. The
same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of
mainstream (i.e. pro-capitalist) economic theory.

All the evidence (not to mention commonsense) shows that this is
absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the
arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards
the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and
solidarity. The very fact that for centuries "rational herdsmen" did
not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin's most fundamental
assumptions — but that hasn't stopped him or his disciples from
erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.

Even if the herder wanted to behave as Hardin described, they
couldn't do so unless certain conditions existed.

There would have to be a market for the cattle, and herders would
have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local
consumption. The herder would have to have enough capital to buy the
additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. The
herder would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger
herd, build bigger barns, etc. And the herder's desire for profit
would have to outweigh their interest in the long-term survival of
their community.

In short, Hardin didn't describe the behaviour of herders in pre-
capitalist farming communities — he described the behaviour of
capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human
nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is
actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behaviour of corporations.

Will private ownership do better?

That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin's argument: in addition
to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably
destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion
that privatisation would save it. Once again he simply presented his
own prejudices as fact:

"We must admit that our legal system of private property plus
inheritance is unjust — but we put up with it because we are not
convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system.
The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate.
Injustice is preferable to total ruin."

The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring
for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their
assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of
cases in which the division and privatisation of communally managed
lands had disastrous results. Privatising the commons has repeatedly
led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of
fertilisers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.

As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development
and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.

"[T]he entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented
towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction
to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of
permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human
generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the
forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less
corresponding to the interests of society as a whole …" (Marx 1998:
611n)

Contrary to Hardin's claims, a community that shares fields and
forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its
ability, even if that means not maximising current production,
because those resources will be essential to the community's survival
for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive,
because they will not survive in business if they don't maximise
short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than
centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.

This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling
absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William
Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money
to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far
in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better
returns, more quickly.

Community management isn't an infallible way of protecting shared
resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and
some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-
based community has capitalism's built-in drive to put current
profits ahead of the wellbeing of future generations.

A politically useful myth

The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not
its lack of evidence or logic — badly researched and argued articles
are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact
that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a
brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental
destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed
experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments
and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to
support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads
to economic growth.

The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-
scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an
explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political
order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and
factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the
rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The
fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological
destruction is a bonus.

Hardin's essay has been widely used as an ideological response to
anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among
indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.

"Hardin's fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal
reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the `scientific'
foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons
and privatisation of public property. … The message is clear: we must
never treat the earth as a `common treasury.' We must be ruthless and
greedy or else we will perish." (Boal 2007)

In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin's
political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations' [Indigenous
Canadians'] reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of
Indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser
Institute urges privatisation of reserve land:

"[T]hese large amounts of land, with their attendant natural
resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada's native
people as long as they are held as collective property subject to
political management. … collective property is the path of poverty,
and private property is the path of prosperity." (Fraser 2002: 16-17)

This isn't just right-wing posturing. Canada's federal government,
which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will "develop
approaches to support the development of individual property
ownership on reserves", and created a C$300 million fund to do just
that.

In Hardin's world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of
racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and
natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human
nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and
clinging to self-destructive collectivism.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth — a scientific-
sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant
world order.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin's essay asserted, without proof,
that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market.
Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and
environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we
can do to make the world better or more just.

In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument as a "repulsive
blasphemy against man and nature". Those words apply with full force
to the myth of the tragedy of the commons.

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