29 pages • 58 minutes read
Garrett James HardinThe Tragedy of the Commons
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Coercion
Coercion is the threat or use of force to alter behavior. Hardin believes that, given the failure of all other attempts at limiting population, the only way to achieve population control is through legislation enforcing limits on family size. Hardin’s idea of coercion isn’t arbitrary or malicious; he sees it as the proper function of civil societies when dealing with problems that can’t be solved at the individual level: “The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected” (Section 9, Paragraph 3).
Commons
A commons is a place or resource open to public use, usually without charge, such as a pasture, park, forest, river, etc. A desirable commons may attract more people until it’s overused and begins to fail. An unregulated commons, the type discussed in Hardin’s essay, has no rules for users to follow: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (Section 3, Paragraph 6). Examples in 1968, the year the article was published, included the atmosphere, oceans, rivers and lakes, wilderness areas, and other resources large enough for any one user to exploit without much effect but which, when exploited by millions, would suffer degradation. Hardin argued for legislation that would regulate the use of such commons and prohibit dumping pollutants into them.
Conscience
A conscience is an awareness that one’s actions can have bad consequences and sense of governing morality concerning those consequences; people of conscience abstain from activities they believe cause harm. Appeals to conscience, however, can backfire when conscientious citizens, answering the call to restrict the size of their families, do so while other, less selfless families continue to reproduce. The result, maintains Hardin, is that people of good conscience tend to disappear over time while more selfish people grow in number. Hardin believes it’s better simply to restrict all families’ reproductive freedom equally.
Exponential growth
Thomas Malthus in 1798 put forth the idea that the human population might grow geometrically—”or, as we would now say, exponentially” (Section 2, Paragraph 1)—and since then, the number of people on Earth has, indeed, grown exponentially. Exponential growth can seem misleadingly small at first: a growth rate of only a few percent causes small gains every year—but, over many decades, that growth can double or triple. Exponential growth can eventually appear to skyrocket, as with human population increases from two billion in the 1920s to eight billion a century later. Such growth rates may quickly outstrip available resources; even if technology keeps improving resource access and efficiency, huge numbers of people can overwhelm ecosystems that then collapse catastrophically and cause a massive loss of resources.
