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.
