Tragedy of the Commons

[Ronald Mitchell]

Colleagues,

I have, like many I assume, taught the Tragedy of the Commons as part of my international environmental politics course for years.  I find it a particularly useful concept as one means of making sense of what we are doing to the planet. I also made a simple online game illustrating it @ https://rmitchel.uoregon.edu/commons  A high school teacher in Oman registered and played it yesterday and brought to my attention an article in Scientific American entitled: “The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons” with blurb: “The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong.” More background is at: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin from the Southern Poverty Law Center. I am confident that some of you knew this about Hardin already and that there will be a diverse set of views on how this should influence the teaching of the Tragedy of the Commons concept, if at all. But I wanted to bring it to the attention of people who might not know about it.

Best to all of you, Ron

 

The Tragedy of "The Tragedy of the Commons"

 

By Matto Mildenberger on April 23, 2019

 

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

 

Fifty years ago, University of California professor Garrett Hardin penned an influential essay in the journal Science. Hardin saw all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbors’ cattle will graze the best grass. So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. We take it first, before someone else steals our share. This creates a vicious cycle of environmental degradation that Hardin described as the “tragedy of the commons.”

 

It's hard to overstate Hardin’s impact on modern environmentalism. His views are taught across ecology, economics, political science and environmental studies. His essay remains an academic blockbuster, with almost 40,000 citations. It still gets republished in prominent environmental anthologies.

 

But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

 

And 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.

 

To create a just and vibrant climate future, we need to instead cast Hardin and his flawed metaphor overboard.

 

People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. 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. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools.

 

Or build a wall to keep immigrants out. Hardin was a virulent nativist whose ideas inspired some of today’s ugliest anti-immigrant sentiment. He believed that only racially homogenous societies could survive. He was also involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group that now cheers President Trump’s racist policies. Today, American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence.

 

These were not mere words on paper. Hardin lobbied Congress against sending food aid to poor nations, because he believed their populations were threatening Earth’s “carrying capacity.”

 

Of course, plenty of flawed people have left behind noble ideas. That Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should not automatically condemn its merits.

 

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.

 

Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. 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). 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.

 

Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination.

 

We must reject his pernicious ideas on both scientific and moral grounds. Environmental sustainability cannot exist without environmental justice. 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?

 

This is particularly important when we deal with climate change. Despite what Hardin might have said, the climate crisis is not a tragedy of the commons. The culprit is not our individual impulses to consume fossil fuels to the ruin of all. 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.

 

Instead, rejecting Hardin’s diagnosis requires us to name the true culprit for the climate crisis we now face. Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible.

 

But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice.

 

This is what makes attacks on individual behavior so counterproductive. Yes, it’s great to drive an electric vehicle (if you can afford it) and purchase solar panels (if powerful utilities in your state haven’t conspired to make renewable energy more expensive). But the point is that interest groups have structured the choices available to us today. Individuals don’t have the agency to steer our economic ship from the passenger deck.

 

As Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes reminds us, “[abolitionists] wore clothes made of cotton picked by slaves. But that did not make them hypocrites … it just meant that they were also part of the slave economy, and they knew it. That is why they acted to change the system, not just their clothes.”

 

Or as Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted: “Living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working towards a better future.” The truth is that two-thirds of all the carbon pollution ever released into the atmosphere can be traced to the activities of just ninety companies.

 

These corporations’ efforts to successfully thwart climate action are the real tragedy.

 

We are left with very little time. We need political leaders to pilot our economy through a period of rapid economic transformation, on a grand scale unseen since the Second World War. And to get there, we are going to have make sure our leaders listen to us, not—as my colleagues and I show in our research—fossil fuel companies.

 

Hope requires us to start from an unconditional commitment to one another, as passengers aboard a common lifeboat being rattled by heavy winds. The climate movement needs more people on this lifeboat, not fewer. We must make room for every human if we are going to build the political power necessary to face down the looming oil tankers and coal barges that send heavy waves in our direction. This is a commitment at the heart of proposals like the Green New Deal.

 

Fifty years on, let’s stop the mindless invocation of Hardin. Let’s stop saying that we are all to blame because we all overuse shared resources. Let’s stop championing policies that privilege environmental protection for some human beings at the expense of others. And let’s replace Hardin’s flawed metaphor with an inclusive vision for humanity—one based on democratic governance and cooperation in this time of darkness.

 

Instead of writing a tragedy, we must offer hope for every single human on Earth. Only then will the public rise up to silence the powerful carbon polluters trying to steal our future.

 

 

Ronald Mitchell, Professor

Department of Political Science and Program in Environmental Studies

University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1284

rmit...@uoregon.edu

https://rmitchel.uoregon.edu/

IEA Database Director: https://iea.uoregon.edu/

 

[Firestone, Jeremy]

Hi Roland,

 

Yes, I have known this for many years.  You might take a look at his paper on Lifeboat Ethics.

 

In addition, his observation while useful, is also incomplete,  See e.g., Feeny, D., Berkes, F., McCay, B.J. et al. The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two years later. Hum Ecol 18, 1–19 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00889070 as well as the work by Elinor Ostrom.

 

Jeremy

 

 

Practice Safe Stints    

 

 

Jeremy Firestone

Professor, School of Marine Science and Policy

Director, Center for Research in Wind (CReW)

Director, First State Marine Wind (FSMW)

University of Delaware

Newark, DE (USA) 19716

j...@udel.edu

www.crew.udel.edu

www.udel.edu/academics/colleges/ceoe/departments/smsp/faculty/jeremy-firestone/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=831LSZ8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

 

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[Thea Riofrancos]

Hi All,

For anyone teaching "tragedy of the commons" I suggest also assigning something that situates Garrett Hardin as a very important figure in the history of the nativist right-wing in the U.S., as well as attacks on the welfare state. It's important for students to understand he had a very clear ideological and normative perspective on issues of immigration, public goods, etc. See, e.g., https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend

I would also suggest complementing with Elinor Ostrom's nobel-prize winning work on the many empirical examples of cooperation around resource and land use.

Yours,

Thea

--
Thea Riofrancos (she/her)
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Providence College

Fellow, Radcliffe Institute (2020-2021)

Fellow, Carnegie Corporation (2020-2022)

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[syma ebbin]

Hi Ron et al.

I do teach the Tragedy in my classes but usually include critiques, allowing my students to read one or two works critical of the essay.  (just understanding the essay and its meandering thread is difficult).

Indeed there is a large amount of literature (mine included) that rebuts Hardin's work. The international professional association: International Assn for the Study of the Commons, previously IASCP, has a journal and archived bibliography that contributes to this debate:

The International Association for the Study of the Commons

The International Association for the Study of the Commons The IASC is the leading professional association dedicated to the study commons. Founded in 1989, it is devoted ...

best regards,

Syma

>>(((((*>~~~~>>(((((*>~~~~>>(((((*>~~~~
Syma A. Ebbin, PhD.

--

[Benjamin Sovacool]

Hi Ron, all, very interesting. My colleague Tony Patt wrote the attached as well, on why the tragedy of the commons has conceptual problems, too. (Not sure I agree entirely with the essay, but I thought I’d share nonetheless):

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629617301433

 

PDF attached for ease of reference.

 

Benjamin

 

From: gep...@googlegroups.com <gep...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Ronald Mitchell
Sent: 31 August 2020 15:23
To: GEP-Ed List <gep...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [gep-ed] Tragedy of the Commons

 

Colleagues,

--

[Jonathan Rosenberg]

Yes, a very interesting and timely discussion.  The abridgement of Tragedy in the latest edition of Conca and Dabelko's Green Planet Blues is on this week's reading list for my Environmental Politics and Policy class.  Aware of Hardin's sordid history, I continue to assign it because it represents a logic of environmental policy-making and assumptions about human nature that are still hegemonic in many seats of political power.  But on rereading it to prepare for class this week I am struck by the distressingly loaded terminology, especially since the abridgement highlights issues related to overpopulation and the need for coercive measures to save benighted humans from themselves.  We can also see how Hardin is already considering some humans less human than others with the repeated use of the word "breeders" to describe them.  Early editions of this reader included "No Tragedy on the Commons" by historian Susan J. Buck Cox, which points out how Hardin misrepresented and/or misunderstood the history of the commons on which he bases his analysis.  I find that useful for stimulating debate among students.

Best wishes,

Jonathan

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Professor of Political Science

Department of Social Sciences

Illinois Institute of Technology

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[Ilkhom Soliev]

Hi Ron and colleagues,

Fully support the previous notes - misconceptions about the commons is quite an issue that the commons community has been trying to raise awareness about. A lot of debate can be found in the links already shared, but here is one more source that I thought might interest you when it comes to teaching - a paper by Marco Janssen and colleagues at the IASC that specifically reports on the findings from a survey of US based instructors who use the concept (Tragedy of Commons) in education:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504622.2019.1632266 (let me know if you want a pdf)

Best,

Ilkhom

--
Ilkhom Soliev, PhD
Senior Research Fellow | Lecturer

Global Environmental Policy and Sustainability Governance
Methods for Institutional Analysis and Policy Evaluation
Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Policy
Martin Luther University (MLU) Halle-Wittenberg
Von-Seckendorff-Platz 4 (R. 4.23)  
06120 Halle (Saale), Germany

Communications Officer for IASC Europe

The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC)

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[Aseem Prakash]

Hi Ron:

Yes, Garrett Hardin was a very controversial individual. Ostrom critiqued the Tragedy of commons. In addition, articles such as the Lifeboat Ethics were

racist.

The attached short piece published in Nature-Sustainability might be of interest: Hardin’s oversimplification of population growth

Aseem

________________________________________________

Aseem Prakash
Professor, Department of Political Science
Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences
Founding Director, UW Center for Environmental Politics
University of Washington, Seattle
aseemprakash.net

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[Ken Conca]

Yes, we dropped Susan Buck’s critique in later editions in order to fit in some of Ostrom’s key ideas. It has the value of focusing on the historical record and fate of the English commons, which Hardin ignored. Students may find a full, manually scanned version of her essay here: https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/3113/buck_NoTragedy.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y  ....Ken Conca

 

 

External Email: Use caution with links and attachments.

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[Libby Lunstrum]

This is a great conversation! Thanks for getting it started! 

I also teach/critique Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. But, in general, I don't find him very useful to make sense of global environmental problems as so many of these are rooted in a capitalist economic system that promotes growth above sustainability. Hardin's "solution" of privatization actually fits very well within this system. (And not to mention the problems of nativism others have raised...)  But, at the same time, I do think some aspects of the concept (of ToftC) can be useful when applied to climate change and the atmosphere as commons. A few years before she died, Ostrom did a fascinating (but short) interview on the topic with NPR, which is quite useful for teaching: Climate Change Is Victim Of 'Tragedy Of The Commons.'

Thanks everyone!

Libby  

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Libby Lunstrum

Associate Professor

School of Public Service

Boise State University

Boise, ID, USA

[Hang Ryeol Na]

Hello everyone,

How could we teach environmental policy or politics courses without mentioning the notion of commons? 1. In my class, the controversial aspect about Dr. Hardin becomes self-evident when we discuss his own proposal to the tragedy of the commons, for example ‘Lifeboat ethics’ (1974), which says the global north, the lifeboats loaded with survivors, should cut off aid to the poor south if their governments refuse to control population growth. Students mostly agree it is in fact the global north that consumes most resources and places most pressure on fragile ecosystems. 2. I usually put equal emphasis on the avoidability of the tragedy as well as its inevitability. Typically we cite the concept of self-governance from Elinor Ostrom, as Thea suggested in her previous email, to demonstrate it is empirically researched.

Kind regards,

Hang Ryeol  

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[Dana R Fisher]

In case you all haven't seen it, in Sociology, we usually contrast the Tragedy of the commons with the more recent research in Disproportionality.  Here are some key readings based on Andrew Jorgenson and my recent chapter in A Sociology Experiment:

Collins, Mary B., Ian Munoz, and Joseph JaJa. 2016. “Linking ‘Toxic Outliers’ to Environmental Justice Communities.” Environmental Research Letters 11(1):015004.

 Freudenburg, William R. 2005. “Privileged Access, Privileged Accounts: Toward a Socially Structured Theory of Resources and Discourses.” Social Forces 84(1): 89–114.

Grant, Don, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer. 2020. Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions. Columbia University Press.    

Dana

---

Dana R. Fisher, Ph.D.

American Resistance 

Director, Program for Society and the Environment

Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland

www.drfisher.umd.edu 

@Fisher_DanaR
pronouns: She/Her

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[DG Webster]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for raising the discussion. I was horrified when I first read the full version of Hardin't ToC piece, having only read excerpts in various courses. My last book, Beyond the Tragedy in Global Fisheries, is essentially a long, drawn-out refutation of the ToC as the fundamental problem in fisheries governance. It's probably too fisheries-centric for most but the core concept of power disconnects links up Ostrom, Buck, and other great suggestions here. In short: When the people making decisions about resource use (through markets, government, etc.) are able to insulate themselves from the costs of overexploitation, power disconnects are wide and environmental damage will be high. When the people making decisions about resource use are vulnerable to those costs, then power disconnects are narrow and they're likely to figure out some way to manage resources sustainably. This could include rules to govern the commons, but extends to laws, science/tech, etc. More importantly, this perspective asserts that social justice isn't a nice add-on to environmental protection but a fundamental requirement. Of course, others make similar arguments, many in re: pollution as Dana pointed out. Would be great to see more interdisciplinary work on the concept. See attached for an interdisciplinary paper that uses power disconnects as part of a critique of ITQs and other panaceas in fisheries. 

best,

dgwebster

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[Rafael Friedmann]

I’d like to see examples of how we’ve been able to effectively counter the interests of the few to continue with Business-as-usual overexploitation or exclusion of externalities and limited analyses of broader systemic impacts. This is the crux more than how much we liked or not TOC and Hardin. Give me solutions! Give me examples of what has worked – but on a massive scale—which is what is needed to actively and successfully tackle the broad impacts we are seeing and will otherwise experience with global climate change.

 

Rafael

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[Ronald Mitchell]

Rafael,

One option I like and believe has shown itself to be effective in some cases and at different scales, is based on Thaler/Sunstein’s notion of “nudges,” decision architectures, and liberal paternalism (great book if you need one to read), some of which was implemented under US President Obama as Sunstein was his policy czar. Basic idea is to take advantage of “what happens if people do nothing” (alteratively phrased as “do people have to opt in or opt out” – so, for example, “motor voter” in the US leads those applying for drivers licenses automatically registers them to vote simultaneously and has, I believe, dramatically increased voter registration in US states that have adopted it. Ditto that for “when you start a job, you will have your company save for retirement and maybe have a company “match” automatically, but you can opt out if you do NOT want that, which dramatically increases retirement savings.  In the environmental sphere, my (ancient) assessment of why tanker owners have oil-pollution-reducing equipment on board is because they don’t have to say “please add ‘oil-pollution-reducing equipment’ to my tanker, but instead have it installed by default (similar to why almost all cars in the US have pollution-reducing catalytic converters – most people would not add them to their car, but very few disable them. There are numerous examples. I won’t vouch for any of the effectiveness of any of these, but its ONE approach that seems to “travel well” across levels of governance and appears to be relatively effective in many settings (though, the collective wisdom of GEPED can surely show why this doesn’t work in many settings).

Ron

[Stevis,Dimitris]

Ron and all:

A very interesting discussion that cannot be limited to Hardin’s misreading of history- as this old poem suggests - http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/“stealing-common-goose”#sthash.B7yCrydB.dpbs 

The environmental movement, in the US and other colonial countries, has a significant share of racist, eugenisist etc founders, such as Muir, Madison Grant,  Osborn Sr (Museum of Natural History), Julian Huxley (UNESCO) and others https://orionmagazine.org/article/conservation-and-eugenics/ and https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history For a longer account see https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/border-walls-gone-green

It may useful for IEP to address these wider genealogy and how it has influenced the framing and study of environmental politics, certainly for the older amongst us. Focusing on Hardin is necessary but should not obscure this broader and painful context within which he acquired legitimacy. This is all the more timely as this story is used by the neoliberal right to criticize environmentalism as a whole - https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-darker-shade-of-green-environmentalisms-origins-in-eugenics/

Perhaps there is an ISA workshop in this.

D

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Dimitris Stevis

Professor
Department of Political Science

Colorado State University
200 West Lake Street
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-1782
USA


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[Jonathan Rosenberg]

Dimitris makes a great point.  On a personal note--I am currently teaching 2 courses:  Environmental Politics and Policy, and International Development.  It is instructive to consider how differently Theodore Roosevelt figures in the historical background for each of them.

Best,

Jonathan

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[Jennifer Allan]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for the wonderful discussion and resources. I've made a slightly different choice on this question: I chose not to directly teach the work of a racist, who was also wrong. I agree there are insights for environmental politics, but they are covered by prisoner's dilemmas, Ostrom's work on the commons, and other ideas cited above. 

I do this for two reasons. First, I ask my students if they have heard the phrase "tragedy of the commons" or the basic argument (after I outline it). Maybe one student has. In other words, I would be introducing this phrase - and all its baggage - into their repertoire, and perpetuating its continued use in various circles. Second, I'm not comfortable giving a diverse student population a reading with such problematic racist language. A lot could be done to prep students and to debrief with them, but I've made the decision to not put my students in that situation in the first place and risk further marginalizing some of them from academia.

I talk to my students that this is an idea that they may hear about. That it's become a popular stand in for many of the complex ideas that we discuss in class. I explain that when people use it, they strip it of its ideological foundations / project, and forget that it's empirically wrong. I provide some of the resources already cited above, but I do not direct them to the original work.

I don't claim this is the best response to this difficult issue, but it's the one I've decided for the time being.

All the best,

Jen

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[Jan E Selby]

Dear all, 

Thanks for a great thread everyone (and apologies that this comes after the thread has died down - email problems). 

My own (still developing) approach to these issues is different again. I am increasingly of the view that I can’t ignore questions of race, and instead need to put them front and centre (including facing up to my own previous neglect/underestimation of them). So when I teach IR theory I now want students to know that as a modern field it started as the study of racial hierarchies and race development. I can no longer teach Kant or Hegel without also teaching their deeply racist anthropologies and geographies. When I teach Israeli-Palestinian politics, I find the part played by racist ideas in shaping the conflict historically (including racialised representations of the environment) difficult to ignore. And on environmental politics, I very much agree with Dimitris that racist ideas go well beyond Hardin. Indeed, when I look at issues of environmental security, I would say that a very large proportion of both public and policy commentary, and academic research on the subject, operates with assumptions which are in key respects racialised legacies of European colonialism. Even the most left wing (including post-colonial) authors sometimes buy into these frameworks. And given this, I see it as crucial to try to sensitive students to these issues. There’s no point blacklisting Hardin if we continue to teach authors where similar assumptions are but better hidden. 

As regards solutions, well that depends what problems we are looking for solutions for. Solutions to environmental problems (or bad policy thereon) are one matter. But another, all too obvious at the moment, is race conflict. And given especially that eco-fascist ideas seem to be on the rise again, with the grave possibility that they might develop further (just wait for the far right to start embracing climate change more fully, and using this as an additional rationale for nativism and white supremacism), it seems to me that educating students about this dark side of environmental politics is an important responsibility. 

Best wishes, and thanks all again,

Jan

PS: new email address - I've moved to University of Sheffield since lasting posting.

Jan Selby


Professor of Politics and International Relations

Department of Politics and IR
University of Sheffield

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic-staff/jan-selby
https://politicsecology.wordpress.com/ 

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[kashwan]

Dear GEP Colleagues,

Thank you for such an insightful thread  -- I couldn't agree more with the suggestion from Dimitris that there is definitely an ISA Workshop and potentially a writing project that would be extremely valuable in the classroom.

There is a common that between two recent comments that I would like to build on: 1) DG Webster's insightful comments on the contingency of the tragedy of commons related to the nature of power distribution, and 2) Jen's fantastic solution to the racist legacies of Hardin's life and work. I think both these comments show us a way out of what I see as the confounding of analytical and empirical arguments related to the tragedy of commons. Let me explain.

At the core of it, tragedy is a behavioral argument. As many have pointed out, the pasture was used as a metaphor, not as an empirical example (though it may have been inspired by misinformed writings on the historical British commons). Ostrom took on the core behavioral argument and exposed the contingency/incompleteness of the arguments that informed Hardin's arguments (and still do for much of the work in game theory and rational-choice theory in mainstream Economics and Public Choice literature). That's why I believe that Jen's solution to the problem is brilliant, because if  one talks about Ostrom's work in its totality, the analytical core of Hardin's argument is fully covered. We don't miss anything at all by not discussing Hardin's writings, with the advantage that one doen't have to make students read such an obviously racist piece. And, by the way, correct me if I am wrong, no matter how hard one tries, some students will invariably use the written word to reinforce their pre-existing biases (and label the professor as a liberal brain-washer in the process). That's why I am going to adopt Jen's solution in future classes.

A second point on the analytical-empirical confounding. From this vantage point, bringing in the question of historical commons (which is discussed in Susan Buck's essay) or the question of scale that is often brought up in different contexts, is a bit of a distraction from the core analytical point of the behavioral roots of the tragedy. In that context, I think DG Webster's comments (and the attached article) presents an analytically oriented way of engaging the scale question within the same framework (without making it overly empirical). When it comes to the interests of the powerful, tragedies of the commons have been avoided in many cases (it's a different matter that they have been resolved in ways that continue to provide the powerful actors a distinct advantage in the post-solution world. Hope that makes sense.

I would argue that these two types of confusions and the related misunderstanding of the tragedy argument partly explain the continued use of the tragedy metaphor and associated frameworks by some on the left (as Jan mentioned). Plus, there is also a deep love for technocratic solutions (as in technocratic socialism).

Lastly, coincidentally, I have been working on two different dimensions of the same debate about the racist legacies of American environmentalism -- will separately share a piece that I wrote for the Conversation on the same topic (though it doesn't refer to Hardin per se).

Best,

Prakash

[Gruby,Rebecca]

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for this excellent discussion! I Tweeted about this issue yesterday and it’s receiving quite a bit of attention, including from many non-social scientists who are learning about ToC critiques for the first time. I promised to share a reading list with anyone who emailed me and I’m getting flooded with requests. What an awesome opportunity, and I don't want to waste it.  What are your favorite ToC critiques written for public and non-specialist audiences? Ideally open access. Looking for material that is accessible to everyone.

Thanks in advance!

Rebecca

____________________________

Dr. Rebecca Gruby
Associate Professor
Dept. of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources
Colorado State University

Phone: +1 (970) 491-5220
Skype: Rebecca.Gruby
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Web: Gruby Lab 

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Visit CSU Land Acknowledgment for history of Native peoples and nations that lived and stewarded the land where the university now resides. 

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[Amy Freitag]

Thank you for this call Rebecca and curious what you come up with. While y'all are digging, if you could also prioritize non-white authors and perspective, that would be great. Since the white European perspective is what got us in this mess in the first place.

Amy

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Amy Freitag

NOAA NCCOS Social Scientist 

amy.f...@noaa.gov 

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[Cristina Inoue]

Thank you all for this interesting thread discussion to make us think, look for, uncover what is hidden in our own theoretical/epistemological perspectives.

Cristina

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Instituto de Relações Internacionais
Universidade de Brasília

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INOUE, C.Y.A; FRANCHINI, M. Socio-environmentalism. In: Arlene B. Tickner and Karen Smith (ed). International Relations from the Global South. Worlds of Difference. Worlding Beyond the West Series. Routledge 2020.

INOUE, C. Y. A. ; RIBEIRO, T. M. M. L. ; RESENDE, I. S. . Worlding global sustainability governance. In: Agni Kalfagianni; Doris Fuchs; Anders Hayden. (Org.). Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance. 1ed.Londres: Routledge, 2020 , p. 59-71.INOUE, Cristina Yumie Aoki. Worlding the Study of Global Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Voices from the Amazon. Global Environmental Politics , v. 18, p. 25-42

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[Gellers, Joshua]

As a coda for those of you interested in the rights of nature, I leave you with an observation about another famous and widely-cited article:

Stone’s (1972) law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, refers to Pantheism, Shintoism, and Taoism as “quaint, primitive and archaic” (p. 498).

Joshua C. Gellers, PhD

Associate Professor

Dept. of Political Science + Public Admin.

University of North Florida

1 UNF Drive

Jacksonville, FL 32224

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 5, 2020, at 4:40 PM, Cristina Inoue <cris...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Gruby,Rebecca]

Hi folks,

Following up on my request for reading recommendations, I wanted to share the list of resources I pulled together for introductory learning and teaching on commons scholarship (see attached). I tried to prioritize articles and books that will be accessible for non-specialists and useful for teaching purposes.  If you have additional suggestions, I’d welcome them. 

I’d like to flag in particular an open access book by John Anderies and Marco Janssen targeting undergraduates and published in English and Spanish:  https://sustainingthecommons.org/

Also wanted to share an interesting recent article looking at how the ToC is taught within environmental studies programs:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2019.1632266?casa_token=n_TweZixW5gAAAAA:80RZ2QwmmzzdYtnsO5ztjCbgPKi7tb8i314H_Toyx_s1hf7GeoMlm8gFLSg_KE4GDgDCA5V9b16z

All the best,

[Elizabeth Havice]

This is great, thank you for compiling, I use Hardin in my section on population & population control in my development and inequality section, it's amazing to given hardin's white supremacy background and break it down, the students are shocked. Hope you are hanging in there!

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