Day 10, Tragedy of the commons

The tragedy of car culture

I first learned about the Tragedy of the Commons while traveling on a train between Copenhagen and Hamburg in 2009. I was returning from the now infamous UN Climate Conference, where I had been part of the media contingent. I was catching up with some of the literature I carefully selected to take away from the thousands of briefing papers that were available.

It describes the foundation principal of economics and ecology, whereby a common asset is degraded by those that share it, because no one person feels responsible for the overall impact of their contribution to its destruction.

Put simply: farmers sharing a paddock to graze their cattle each use it as much as they need: however, they end up destroying the pasture because no single farmer can see how their individual action affects what may otherwise have seemed like a 'very big paddock'.

Today, we can see how this applies to everything from dropping a lolly wrapper in the street to over-fishing the Earth's oceans and climate change. It's a matter of being able to see how individual action contributes to the whole.

I believe the environmental crisis we are facing today is a result of scale and perspective.
It's understandable, should involve no shame or blame but needs to be solved by strong governance.

If you want to find out more on this, go to Garrett Hardin's incredible article published in 1968, where he proposes the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons and covers topics including, nuclear war (a very hot topic at the time), population control, pollution and the role of conscience and mutual coercion. Essential reading for every human.

Earthrise, Wikipedia