POSTSCRIPT

presents no problem to the theory of unmanaged commons. The survival of today s industrialized nations is now threatened by a different sort of commonization. Decades of wellintentioned propaganda in favor of a world without borders have stripped sophisticated moderns of psychological defences against truly entropic forces. To each according to his needs implies that needs create rights. Such rights can be fulfilled on a global scale only if national borders are effectively liquidated. The resulting poverty will accelerate the destruction of environmental wealth. Gresham s Law of economics bad money drives out good - has, under a global system of laissez-faire, its cognate in the environmental sphere: Low environmental standards drive out high . Poverty displaces wealth - globally. To each according to his needs is an immensely seductive phrase to religious people, but in a world without national population controls it is a sure recipe for disaster. Those who are really concerned with the environment - concerned with the well-being of posterity - must give the carrying capacity of the environment precedence over discontinuous human needs, however much these needs may tug at our heartstrings. Of every impulse to globalize wealth the ecologist must ask his ultimate question, And then what? What happens after globalized wealth degenerates into globalized poverty? What happens then to the environment for which posterity will hold us responsible?
Garrett Hardin
Dept of Biologicul Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

The tragedy of the unmanagedcommons

n science, as in other human endeavI ours, progress is sometimes delayed by a double-take , to borrow a term from the comic theatre. The message is first met with silence, only later to be followed by a painful dawn of understanding. Recall the silence that greeted Mendel s theory of heredity in 1866. Not until 1900 did three scientists experience a doubletake and alert the world to genetics. Delay of the take : 34 years. Human ecology furnishes another example. In 1833 William Forster Lloyd published his Oxford lecturesr. Little notice was taken of this work until 1968, when I expanded the theory in my essay, The tragedy of the commons z. Contributing to the long neglect, no doubt, was a 43-word summary in a massive review published in 1953 by the United Nations3. This book, the work of an anonymous committee, had the thrust of Lloyd s argument exactly wrong4. Duration of the double take : 135 years. The intellectual climate of the times no doubt contributed to the delay. Laissezfaire was the dominant attitude after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The prevailing spirit was wholly optimistic and non-interventionist. Let each man pursue his own interest, economists said, and the interests of all will be best served in the long run. Not necessarily, said Lloyd. Let a number of herdsmen turn their cattle loose in a pasture that is jointly owned and soon the common will be ruined. Why? Because the pasture has a limited carrying capacity (to use a modern term), and each herdsman gets the full benefit of adding to his herd, while the disbenefits arising from overexploitation of the resource (e.g. soil erosion) are shared by all the herdsmen. Fractional losses are not enough to deter aggressive cattle owners, so all the exploiters suffer in an unmanaged common5. Alternatives to the unmanaged commons can be classified under two headings. In privatism, the resource is subdivided into many private properties. Each owner is responsible for the management of his plot: those who manage well, prosper; those who manage poorly, suffer. In socialism, the resource is common property , but the property-owners ( the people ) appoint a manager to control its exploitation. Theoretically, an incompetent manager can be fired. In practice, when the people is a nation of many millions, it is all too easy for empowered managers (bureaucrats) to survive by hiding their mistakes. Both privatism and socialism can either succeed or fail. But, except in the smallest of communities, commonism cannot succeed. An unmanaged common fails because it rewards individual exploiters for making the wrong decisions - wrong for the group as a whole, and wrong for themselves, in the long run. Freedom in the commons does not produce a stable prosperity. This is Lloyd s revolutionary point. Popular prophets, intoxicated by laissez-faire, simply could not hear Lloyd. Apparent exceptions to the theory need to be accounted for. First, a trivial case. When a resource is present in abundance, an unmanaged common may actually be the most efficient. The general rule, freedom of the seas , led for centuries to the economical exploitation of oceanic fisheries. Second: scale effects must be kept in mind. People of the Hutterite faith in northwestern United States and adjacent Canada live by the Christian ideal that (ironically) Karl Marx expressed best: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs . Farms are owned in common: and everybody is supposed to pitch in and do his share of the work, while taking out no more than a fair share of the products. Conscientious Hutterites make a nominally unmanaged commons work - but only so long as the operational unit is less than 150 people. As the number approaches this, more and more commune members shirk their tasks. (Perhaps we should say a community below 150 really is managed managed by conscience.) If such devout and hard-working people cannot make an unmanaged common work, there is no reason to think that anyone can. And it s a long way from 150 to the millions that make up a modern nation. Scale effect rules out the unmanaged commons as an important political possibility in the modern world. Modern nations are a changeable hodgepodge of socialism and privatism. Some ecologists have failed to see subtle signs of management in traditional societies. For instance, the survival of the Turkana people in Africa under a system of common ownership of grazing was recently cited as an instance of the success of commonism6. Yet the same account noted that access to resources was effectively controlled by the elders of the tribe. Such a managed commons

References
Lloyd, W.F. (1833) Lectures on Population, Value, PoorLaws and Rent [Fats. edn (1968);. Augustus M. Kelley Hardin, G. (1968) Science 162, 1242-1248 United Nations (1953) The Determinants ond Consequences of Population Trends, United Nations Hardin, G. (1993) Liorng Within Limrfs. Oxford University Press Hardin, G. (1991) in Commons Without Tragedy (Andelson, R.V.,ed.). pp. 162-185, Shepheard-Walwyn Monbiot, G. (1994) .%I.Am January 140

C 1994. Elsevier

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