![]() And the solution is not to let small islands in Chesapeake Bay or whole countries in the Pacific sink into the past, without a seat on our planetary lifeboat. The culprit is not our individual impulses to consume fossil fuels to the ruin of all. Despite what Hardin might have said, the climate crisis is not a tragedy of the commons. This is particularly important when we deal with climate change. Are we really prepared to follow Hardin and say there are only so many lead pipes we can replace? Only so many bodies that should be protected from cancer-causing pollutants? Only so many children whose futures matter? Environmental sustainability cannot exist without environmental justice. We must reject his pernicious ideas on both scientific and moral grounds. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. Using the tools of science-rather than the tools of hatred-Ostrom showed the diversity of institutions humans have created to manage our shared environment. This striking finding was the life’s work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (technically called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. That Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should not automatically condemn its merits.īut the facts are not on Hardin’s side. Of course, plenty of flawed people have left behind noble ideas. Hardin lobbied Congress against sending food aid to poor nations, because he believed their populations were threatening Earth’s “carrying capacity.” Today, American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence. He was also involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group that now cheers President Trump’s racist policies. He believed that only racially homogenous societies could survive. Hardin was a virulent nativist whose ideas inspired some of today’s ugliest anti-immigrant sentiment. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools. Subheadings proclaim that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” It opines at length about the benefits if “children of improvident parents starve to death.” A few paragraphs later Hardin writes: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” And on and on. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. To create a just and vibrant climate future, we need to instead cast Hardin and his flawed metaphor overboard. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.Īnd he promoted an idea he called “ lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. ![]() He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. It still gets republished in prominent environmental anthologies.īut here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. ![]() His essay remains an academic blockbuster, with almost 40,000 citations. ![]() His views are taught across ecology, economics, political science and environmental studies. It's hard to overstate Hardin’s impact on modern environmentalism. This creates a vicious cycle of environmental degradation that Hardin described as the “tragedy of the commons.” We take it first, before someone else steals our share. So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. Hardin saw all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbors’ cattle will graze the best grass. Fifty years ago, University of California professor Garrett Hardin penned an influential essay in the journal Science. ![]()
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