Blog Post #5

Artem Muchnik

Mr. Shirk

GVPT200

Dec 4, 2013

                                                Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a theory that had been established by Garrett Hardin, this theory focused on the idea that humans will exhaust any means of common goods in order to profit themselves in current time without looking at the overall long term impacts of their actions, basically as Hardin says, “fouling our own nest”. When considering common goods, such things that qualify would be farming and herding land, bodies of water for fishing etc, basically any part of the earth that is open to exploitation. As any theory, there is always someone to contradict the claims of said theory and the person who believes differently about the Tragedy of the Commons is Susan Buck. Buck agrees with Hardin that “certainly we cannot deny that the phenomenon exists” and that “for hundreds of years-and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era-land was successfully managed by communities” but aside from agreeing on that she has some major views that differ exponentially to what Hardin believed. First of all Buck states that Hardin’s way of defining the Tragedy of the Commons is incorrect, that he has erroneous statements regarding some key points in history, and that his way of explaining how the system was run was incorrect too. Overall after reading both articles; The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, and No Tragedy on the Commons by Susan Buck, I agree more with what Hardin states in his theory compared to Buck because even though Buck contradicts a lot of the things Hardin says, it all comes back around to having resemblance to what Hardin originally had said.

When reading through Buck’s article in one part, Abuses of the Commons, she states that, “The commons were subject to several forms of abuse. Often the regulations governing the commons were broken, as when greedy farmers took in unauthorized animals, or when wealthy landowners or squatters took grazing to which they were not entitled”, this points directly back at Hardin’s definition of the Tragedy of the Commons which Buck claimed was incorrect. Overall I personally believe that Hardin had the right idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, and as much as Buck tries to prove some of his statements wrong, he actually has a logical point in everything.

When observing Buck’s article some things that she states tend to stand out, such as; “The right of common was a right granted to specific persons because these persons had some prior claim to the land or because the actual owner of the land granted them that right in return for their services” based off of this quote, one can assume that since land was more often then not granted to certain people and not everyone, then the people in charge of granting that land for use were more then aware of the problem that granting that use completely publicly would bring, also back in that time I don’t believe that there were such strong regulations on this and that all land was rationed as such; therefore there were probably areas of land that were granted to the public therefore supporting Hardin’s theory either way; since the people were aware that public land use would bring about the tragedy of the commons and most likely not all land was subject to such privatization some land did most likely suffer from the tragedy of the commons.

Personally after what I have read I think that the Tragedy of the Commons is existent and that Hardin has the right idea, even if a few of his facts are not precise, the theory cant be debunked as false or not as a real possible tragedy. Even to this day multiple people and companies abuse and exploit land, oceans and everything else possible no matter how regulated it is for their own gain; and that is the exact definition of the Tragedy of the Commons no matter at what time period you look at it at in my opinion.