In 1968, the ecologist
Garrett Hardin published an article in Science
magazine entitled The Tragedy of the
Commons. Basically, it was an
abstract argument intended to show how all forms of communal organisation of
property eventually ended in chaos. The
word ‘commons’ comes into the title because Hardin used the idea of rural
commonage—land not individually owned to which everyone had access for
grazing—as the basis of his argument.
The fundamental flaw in
Hardin’s reasoning was identified by Lin Ostrom, later a Nobel prizewinning
economist, who had a special interest in the field of communal property and its
management. She argued that Hardin’s
assumption that commonage or communal property was property that anybody could take advantage of was in
reality flawed. From her own experience,
communal property systems were tightly organised and controlled, access to them
being confined to an agreed group of people who alone had a right to take
advantage of them. Hardin’s formulation
of a communal system to which anybody and anybody had access had no roots in
reality, and any theory built on the foundation of such an assumption was
therefore flawed.
And, of course, she was
right—insofar as it went.
Most Irish people,
especially those living in rural districts will be familiar with the idea of
commonage. For example, in mountainy
areas marginal land tends often to be farmed in such a way. Rights to the mountain are confined to those
farmers who have land abutting it, and usually there are stocking restrictions
depending upon the extent of each one’s borderage.
However, the system
survives only to the extent that qualifying farmers jealously preserve such
rights, especially with regard to preventing those who have no bordering land
from grazing animals on the commonage.
It is at this point
that Hardin’s argument takes on a renewed relevance. It was his contention that if there is open
access to such commonage then inevitably it will become overgrazed and the
ecosystem underlying it will collapse.
His theory became increasingly controversial to the extent that he
believed it had a wider human application and that uncontrolled population
growth was likely—indeed, certain—to lead to wider economic and environmental
disaster.
My reason for raising this matter at all is that
there are further important implication arising from it, which I will be
exploring over the next couple of mailings.
