From Ben Haller, Ithaca, New York, US
Pearce describes a view that the lesson of the “tragedy of the commons” is that “the only way to prevent this tragedy was to turn common land into private property… privatising the planet is the key to conservation”.
But in his article putting forward the idea, Hardin observed that the economist Adam Smith “contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society.” He notes that many “commons” don't work well as private property: “the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means.”
In the end he recommends “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected” – in other words, the social contract of democratic government.
Advertisement
