The criminals producing the current climate crisis would have us believe it’s a “tragedy of the commons” — the inevitable result of individuals pursuing their self-interest in a world of finite resources. The term was popularized by biologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 article in Science, one of the most cited — and vociferously refuted — scientific essays of the twentieth century. Hardin maintained that environmental tragedy inevitably accompanies the public use and management of land, water, and air. But the real history of the depletion of the commons tells almost the opposite story: one of privatization, enclosure, and relentless profit seeking.
Hardin’s discredited essay revolves around a simple parable: some herdsmen are grazing their cows on a common pasture. It goes well for a few millennia, in fact so well that each herdsman decides to graze an extra cow, figuring that the personal benefit of the extra cow outweighs the stress to the pasture. Pretty soon the grass is picked over, the cows starve, and everyone on the planet dies. But here’s the kicker: it was always what was going to happen. A shared finite resource will always succumb to overuse. “The inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest.” Tragic.
It’s been almost fifteen years since political scientist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for a life’s work demonstrating that people are indeed capable of sharing finite resources without depleting them. Yet as rapid environmental devastation forces the issue of resource management into public debate, Hardin’s influence has only grown. A eugenicist and white nationalist whose academic work on population control came paired with a very specific political agenda about which populations demanded targeting, Hardin has enjoyed a cult revival on the hard right. His rhetoric is being taken up by fossil fuel’s hired guns as they shift their defensive strategy from climate change denialism to assertions that we all share blame for warming the planet.
You can even happen upon Hardin references in what’s supposed to be the well-informed mainstream. In a recent explainer on the New York Times’ investigation into the terrifying depletion of US groundwater, for example, reporter David Leonhardt chooses to invoke Hardin’s fatalistic ecofascist fable over Ostrom’s fieldwork — much of it on the use of groundwater — that served as the basis for her celebrated eight principles for managing a commons.