Valedictory

I have refrained from uploading the third part of The Tragedy of the Commons mainly because I needed to think.

The consequence of this thinking is that I have decided to close this blog for an indefinite period.  The reason for doing this is that what I am writing about is past its sell-by date.  The world has changed in the seven years since I began the first series of blogs, especially over the last period.

We have entered a time when matters will be decided on the political and other stages, rather than through debate.  History is on the move and tends daily to outstrip anything we might write about it.  Indeed, I think, we are standing on the edge of a precipice and it will be some time until those who survive the fall can dust themselves off and begin again.

Faced with a storm at sea, the proper reaction is to batten down the hatches.  This is what needs to be done now from the lowest level up—individually, communally, even nationally, if in the latter case such a thing is any longer possible.  And all for purposes merely of survival.

Things are spiralling out of control.  There are periods in history when failure is the inevitable consequence of every effort, even the best-intentioned; when it is no longer possible to do right for doing wrong.  I think we’re facing such a period now.

Events are going to drive history for the time being, not blogs, not words.

 All the best.

'The Tragedy of the Commons' (2)

Michael Viney of The Irish Times described the effects of overgrazing in the Sheeffry mountains in Mayo in a 2014 article.  Referring back to a visit made in 1994, he said: ‘For most of an hour’s hike, this bog is a desert of black slime, pricked here and there by a miserable stubble . . . The bog’s final break-up into black mush is a shocking thing to see.’  Speaking of an aerial survey done in Connemara around the same time, he wrote: ‘One remote valley in the Twelve Bens, in Connemara, was a great, dark wound, skinned and suppurating with surface water and covering hundreds of hectares . . .’

It was something like this, but on a macro-economic scale, that Garrett Hardin was forecasting for the world economy should population continue to grow on an exponential scale.  As discussed in the previous mailing, this projection was questioned by Lin Ostrom on the basis of her study of commonage systems.

Yet it is worth examining how Hardin’s contention might fare in the context of a limited but stable commonage system, such as tends to occur here and there in Ireland.

Now at this point, it is worth saying that the situation described by Michael Viney was a consequence of greed on the part of the farmers involved, based upon, in his words, ‘the folly of EU policy in paying hill farmers per head of sheep without considering the kind of land they were grazing.’

But leaving that aside, what other circumstances might lead to a similar outcome?  The only one that comes to mind is if the farmers with rights to the commonage became slack in their stewardship and were to allow others who had no rights to take advantage of the grazing.

Now I am speaking here of the logic of the situation, not the law, which is generally a more complicating factor.

The reality of such a notional Irish commonage system is that access to grazing is confined to those who have land adjoining it.  This is not primarily a legal arrangement, but a practical one, in that these farmers control physical access to the common grazing—no one else can get to it without crossing their land.  The evolution of commonage rights is not a question of legal or constitutional enactment, though such things may well reinforce it after the event, but primarily a reflection of how things actually are on the ground.

Now as long as the farmers involved are intent on policing their rights, then the situation, leaving aside the circumstances mentioned above by Michael Viney, is potentially stable.  But should, say, the farmers grow lax and tolerate someone who has no rights accessing the grazing, then logically, and probably legally too, anybody can come along and claim the same freedom to put their animals on the commonage.  And this inevitably, in line with Hardin’s prediction, is likely on a local level to lead, as Tim Harford was to paraphrase it in the Financial Times, ‘inescapably to ecological disaster and the [at least temporary] collapse of the commons’.

Hardin’s broader argument seems assume that there is some sort of world community already in existence—or at least that the world is heading that way.  A world community with equal access for all to the commonage of the means of subsistence and production—for in such a situation there can no longer be any basis for ‘them’ and ‘us’.  Everybody enjoys the same rights—or, which is much the same thing, nobody enjoys any rights.

Ostrom’s argument, whether she meant it to be taken in this way or not, was effectively that this was not the case.  Communities exist within the framework of the human race and implicitly are expressions of an exceptionalism that separates each off from the rest of its fellows. Rather like climbing the steps of a stair, she viewed the future as resulting from the slow creative process of working to solve everyday problems as they arose, rather than jumping ahead and embracing notional views of the future, whether apocalyptic or rose-coloured, and trying to shape strategies to fit.

And, in this, I tend to agree with her.  In terms of current discourse, ‘we are where we are’.  And that is where we must start from—from the realities of life as they exist; and not some sentimental or ideological pipedream about how things allegedly should be.

More about this next time.