Garrett Hardin
At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York' concluded that: Both sides in the arms race are . . . confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.
I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semi-popular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may he defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qual-ified their statement with the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment...." Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the pres-ent article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these. It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that 1 cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game—refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)
The class of "no technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem—technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
WHAT SHALL WE MAXIMIZE?
Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world? A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape.2
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?
No—for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by Von Neumann and Morgenstern,3 but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert ( 1717-1783). The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art.... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible. In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipa-tion, as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown.4 The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable. The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely re-quire more than one generation of hard analytical work—and much persuasion. We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.
Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are com-mensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables. Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.
Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero. Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a popula-tion is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miser-able. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum. We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcise the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest."5 Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.
THE TRAGEDY OF FREEDOM IN A COMMONS
The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlets in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher White-head used it:7 "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly + 1.
2. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of - 1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial.8 The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed. A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space, the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.) In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.9
The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent—there is only one Yosemite Valley —whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone. What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all objectionable. But we must choose—or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.
POLLUTION
In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in—sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the light of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers. The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them un-treated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream—whose property extends to the middle of the stream—often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly per-ceived aspect of the commons.
The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every ten miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
HOW TO LEGISLATE TEMPERANCE?
Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public; the same behavior in a metro-polis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior. In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be deter-mined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words," said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally—in words.
That morality is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the past. "Thou shalt not . . ." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason—Quis custodies ipsos custodes?—'Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" John Adams said that we must have "a government of laws and not men." Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption, producing a government by men, not laws.
Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities un-necessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodies denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.
FREEDOM TO BREED IS INTOLERABLE
The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of "dog eat dog"—if indeed there ever was such a world—how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feed-back demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds." But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least. If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own "punishment" to the gene line—then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state,' 2 and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons. In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement?'3 To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action. Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some thirty nations agreed to the following:14
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by someone else.
It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident in of Salem, Massachusetts, who denied the reality of witches in the seventeenth century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope," that we shouldn't find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the arch-conservatives. However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy." If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis's in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its ways in embrac-ing the same tragic ideal.
CONSCIENCE IS SELF-ELIMINATING
It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Gallon Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.
People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated, generation by generation. In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contra-cipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Horno progenitivus." 16 The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary—but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good—by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.
PATHOGENIC EFFECTS OF CONSCIENCE
The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but it has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear?—not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (1, the intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; (2, the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."
Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia.'' The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience." said Nietzsche, "is a kind of illness." To conjure up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level suc-cumb to this temptation. Has any President during the past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in non-cooperators. For centuries it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt it.
Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says:
No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy,
nor
compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to them-
selves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but
to their
anxieties.18
One does not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety generating mechanisms of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers;'9 it is not a pretty one. Since proof is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's (or the world's) breeders. But what is the meaning of the word responsibility in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for nothing.
If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it.20 "Responsibility," says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements." Notice that Frankel calls for social arrangements—not propaganda.
MUTUAL COERCION MUTUALLY
AGREED UPON
The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret. The morality of bank robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion. Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsi-ble bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected. To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that volun-tary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.
An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal posses-sion should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance—that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust—but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. injustice is preferable to total ruin. It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out,21 worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two uncon-scious assumptions: (1) that the status quo is perfect; or (2) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.
But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvan-tages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.
RECOGNITION OF NECESSITY
Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.
First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.
Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations. In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the com-mons in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create supersonic transport which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast to coast three hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?
Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and "freedom" fill the air. But what does "freedom" mean'? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity." The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short. The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious free-doms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"—and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
NOTES
1. J. B. Wiesner and H. F. York, Scientific American 211 (No. 4), 27 (1964). Offprint 319.
2. G. Hardin, J. Hered. 50, 68 (1959); S. van Hoernor, Science 137, 18 (1962).
3. J. van Neumann and O. Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, N.J., 1947), p. 11.
4. J. H. Fremlin, New Sci., No. 415 (1964), p. 285.
5. A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, New York, 1937), p. 423.
6. W. F. Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, England, 1833) reprinted (in part) in G. Hardin, ea., Population, Evolu-tion, and Birth Control, 2nd ed. (W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1969), p. 28.
7. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Mentor, New York, 1948), p. 17.
8. G. Hardin, ea., Population, Evolution, and Birth Control, 2nd ed. (W. H. Free-man and Company, San Francisco, 1969), p. 46.
9. S. McVay, Scientific American 216 (No. 8), 13 (1966). Offprint 1046. 10. J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster, Philadelphia, 1966).
11. D. Lack, The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1954).
12. H. Girvetz, From Wealth to Welfare (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford,
Calif..
1950).
13. G. Hardin, Perspec. Biol. Med . 6, 366 (1963).
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19. A. Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (Nelson, London, 1967).
20. C. Frankel, The Casefor Modern Man (Harper, New York, 1955), p. 203.
21. I. D. Roslansky, Genetics and the Future of Man (Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1966), p. 177.
Garrett Hardin
A scholar who ventures outside his own field can confidently expect soon to be informed that his pronouncements are not as original as he has supposed. So much have I learned in publishing "The Tragedy of the Commons." Though officially trained only in microbiology (and in only a micro-part of that vast field), in writing "Tragedy" I did not hesitate to make assertions that impinged on the fields of economics, political science, human behavior, and ethics. I was soon informed that there was a considerable literature on "common pool resources" in economics and that Aristotle long ago had said, "What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care." So what is new in my essay? Just this, I think: the emphasis on the tragedy of the situation. Aristotle's statement is as bland as a bureaucrat's: It hardly impels one to take action. Yet action is what we must have now that the world is overcrowded—action in the form of rejecting the commons as a distribution system. Failing that, a tragic end is our fate. No fate is intrinsically inevitable; rather, each fate is contingent upon the mechanism that produces it. How overpopulation leads to a disastrous end was clearly set forth by an English geologist and minister, Joseph Townsend (1739-1816), in A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, published in 1786, a decade after Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The essential passage follows:
In the South Seas there is an island, which from the first discoverer is called Juan Fernandez. In this sequestered spot, John Fernando placed a colony of goats, consisting of one male, attended by his female. This happy couple find-ing pasture in abundance, could readily obey the first commandment, to increase and multiply, till in process of time they had replenished their little island. In advancing to this period they were strangers to misery and want, and seemed to glory in their numbers: but from this unhappy moment they began to suffer hunger; yet continuing for a time to increase their numbers, had they been endued with reason, they must have apprehended the extremity of famine. In this situation the weakest first gave way, and plenty was again restored. Thus they fluctuated between happiness and misery, and either suffered want or rejoiced in abundance, according as their numbers were diminished or increased; never at a stay, yet nearly balancing at all times their quantity of food. This degree of aequipoise was from time to time destroyed, either by epidemical diseases or by the arrival of some vessel in distress. On such occasions their numbers were considerably reduced; but to compensate for this alarm, and to comfort them for the loss of their companions, the survivors never failed immediately to meet returning plenty. They were no longer in fear of famine: they ceased to regard each other with an evil eye; all had abundance, all were contented, all were happy. Thus, what might have been considered as misfortunes, proved a source of comfort; and, to them at least, partial evil was universal good. When the Spaniards found that the English privateers resorted to this island for provisions, they resolved on the total extirpation of the goats, and for this purpose they put on shore a greyhound dog and bitch. These in their turn increased and multiplied, in proportion to the quantity of the food they met with; but in consequence, as the Spaniards had foreseen, the breed of goats diminished. Had they been totally destroyed, the dogs likewise must have perished. But as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circum-spection in the valleys, few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the most watchful, strong, and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food. Thus a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives. It is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species. In the woods, and in the savage state, there can be few inhabitants; but of these there will be only a proportional few to suffer want. As long as food is plenty they will continue to increase and multiply; and every man will have ability to support his family, or to relieve his friends, in proportion to his activity and strength. The weak must depend upon the precarious bounty of the strong; and, sooner or later, the lazy will be left to stiffer the natural consequence of their indolence. Should they introduce a community of goods, and at the same time leave every man at liberty to marry, they would at first increase their numbers, but not the sum total of their happiness, till by degrees, all by being equally reduced to want and misery, the weakly would be the first to perish.
Ashley Montagu, commenting on this passage, says: "Townsend recounts the story of what is purported to have happened on Robinson Crusoe’s island." The word purported belittles the moral of the story. Whether or not Townsend's tale is historically correct, the moral is nonetheless supported by empir-ical facts. In our time, David Klein's study of the reindeer on St. Matthew Island tells essentially the same story and points to the same moral. A population of 29 animals, minus predators, released on this remote island off the coast of Alaska, multiplied to 6,000 animals in 19 years and then, through starvation, "crashed" to 42 in three years. The 42 were in miserable condition and probably all sterile. This may well be the end of the story, though it is possible that the population might later "fluctuate between happiness and misery," as supposed by Townsend. In any case, a predator-free population, multiplying freely and enjoying "a community of goods," can know only transient happiness as it races toward overpopulation.
Stability and happiness are possible only if the positive feedback of natural biological reproduction—interest earning interest, compound interest in economic terms—finds a countervailing force in negative feedback. To use other terms, runaway feedback must be opposed by corrective feedback to produce a stable system. Wolves could have been the corrective feedback on St. Matthew Island, but the human beings who stocked the island did not think to include predators. Bacteria and other disease organisms can act as micro-predators and hence as negative feedbacks. So also can starvation, when worst comes to worst. How much fluctuation there is in the size of the population of the propositus population (reindeer, in this case) depends on the particularities of the life cycles in the organisms involved—prey, macro-predators, micro-predators, and food organisms (lichens). If the time constants of the interacting species are wrong, even a system with negative feedback may collapse. Complexities and discontinuities in the environment—the "craggy rocks" of Townsend's model—may also be required for persistence of the demographic system. Real demography is not simple, not even among non-human species. The human species has freed itself of all macro-predators and bids fair soon to do the same for all micro-predators. What effective controls remain? There are only three substantial possibilities: the "misery and vice" (the "positive checks") of the first edition of Malthus's essay—starvation and human con-flict, in which man is his own predator—and the "preventive checks" of the second edition. The only acceptable preventive checks, in Malthus's mind, fell under the heading of "moral restraint"—delay in the age of marriage and considerable sexual continence in marriage (hopefully coupled with complete continence outside). We latter-day Malthusians (though not Malthus himself) also regard contraception as a genuinely moral restraint. Whatever its defini-tion, moral restraint raises political problems of great difficulty. It is in the nature of biological reproduction that it anticipates no limit: In every species the exponential curve of unopposed population growth soars off toward infinity. Population is prevented from reaching this goal by countervailing forces that are extrinsic to the propositus species—predators and the like. The coexistence of all the forces produces a more or less precise population equilibrium. By removing the countervailing forces of predators and disease from the population of our own species, we have created a disequilibrium that can persist for only a moment, as time is reckoned geologically. If utter misery is to be avoided, Homo sapiens must create and maintain new countervailing forces that are intrinsic to his own species—contraception and continence, to mention the most acceptable. (Less acceptably, war and geno-cide can perform the same function.) The adoption and enforcement of intrinsic controls necessarily involve policy. Who is to be controlled? By what means? What do we do with non-cooperators? How do we superintend education so as to minimize non-cooperation and the problems it creates? These are all political questions. It is astonishing how the inescapably political nature of human population control is ignored by the political establishment. The United States government annually finances several hundred million dollars of research that is labeled population research in official summaries. From the titles of the projects I would estimate that at least 98 percent of them are either pedestrian surveys of the most unproductive sort or attempts to improve the technology of contraception. But we already have a nearly perfect system of birth control, and a perfect system of birth control merely permits people to have the number of children they want. It is an empirical fact that in every country in the world the number of children wanted by the average family is greater than the number needed to produce population equilibrium in that nation. Theoretically, this is perfectly understandable. Human psychology has evolved in an environment that included extrinsic countervailing forces which human ingenuity has only lately removed. Some mating couples internalize effective control forces, but not all do so. Population problems are created by those who cannot, or will not, internalize the necessary controls. In the absence of extrinsic population controls, a totally voluntary control system selects for its own failure. Even a partial abandonment of voluntarism in the United States will require difficult political adjustments. With government money, it is perilous even to study the possibilities of change. How can a going political concern finance its own (partial) dissolution? Our exceptional Constitution makes change more practicable than it is for most nations, but even for us it is not easy. Before significant political change can be instituted, there must be a fundamental improvement in the theory and practice of economics, which needs to be firmly tied down to the sort of conservation laws that have proven essential to the progress of the natural sciences. The idea of a conservation law is much older than science. Basically it is this—that in any equation that stands for before-and-after, what is on the left side of the equation must equal what is on the right side. This is the spirit behind double-entry bookkeeping, known to exist (in Genoa) as far back as the year 1340. In the investigation of nature, a lack of the discipline of balancing income and outgo kept alchemy from achieving any significant insights into chemical processes. It was Lavoisier, on the eve of the French Revolution, who changed alchemy to chemistry by the discipline of the mandatory balanced equation. A similar advance was made in physics in the middle of the nineteenth century with the explicit statement of the law of the conservation of energy. This signal advance was momentarily imperiled when in 1896 Becquerel discovered the spontaneous fluorescence of uranium, which seemed to mean that we could get something (radiant energy) for nothing (no known energy input). The anomaly was resolved nine years later when Einstein wrote an equation that conserved matter and energy jointly. Since then, conservation principles have reigned supreme in physics and chemistry. It is hard to see how these sciences could have progressed otherwise.
What about economics? There is some ambivalence here. On the one hand, economists constantly remind their students that there is no such thing as a free lunch. On the other, in many public areas, particularly when politically pressed, some economists act on the non-conservative assumption that demand creates supply. In a limited economic context there is a quasi-truth in this doctrine, but not in any rigorous sense. Unfortunately, the rapid progress of technology during the past two centuries has repeatedly expanded the area of known supplies, thus making it difficult to denote the explicit limits of conservation in everyday affairs. Faced with threats of limited supplies, politicians and economists, like Dickens's Mr. Micawber, optimistically intone "Something will turn up." Unfortunately, under the impetus of science, something quite often does, and this undeserved good fortune encourages economist-advisers to sound more like alchemists than scientists, or even good book-keepers. The basic conservative concept of ecologists is the idea of carrying capac-ity, which defines that population of the propositus species that can be supported by a given territory year after year without degrading the environment —that is, without lowering its carrying capacity subsequently. Transgressing the carrying capacity even for a short time can set in train degradative processes (such as soil erosion) that operate by the rule of positive feedback (run-away feedback). For this reason, transgressing the carrying capacity even momentarily is an error of the most serious sort. The degraded environment of the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean is a permanent monu-ment to transgressions committed two thousand years ago. Because carrying capacity varies seasonally in a predictable way, and unpredictably over longer periods of time, conservative management dictates that the operating figure for carrying capacity always be kept well below the momentary actual carrying capacity by an amount that we can call the margin of safety. Even with these refinements, determining the carrying capacity for the ani-mal populations that people exploit is fairly straightforward; for people themselves this is not so. We must first face the reality that this carrying capacity has, for a long time, been slowly moved upward by technology. Should we base the political and economic decisions of today on the increase in carrying capacity anticipated for tomorrow? The true conservative would say no; but few economists in the twentieth century have been conservatives. Conservatives are satisfied to postpone the spending of tomorrow's (possible) income until tomorrow; that way they do not risk transgressing the carrying capacity. For human beings, carrying capacity is ineluctably tied to the desired standard of living, which is a political decision. Some people want to include meat in their diet, recreational vehicles in their life, and the delights of wilderness and uncrowded areas in which "unimproved" land creates a "waste" of natural resources. (The quotation marks surround the implicit value judgments of those of the opposite persuasion.) By political decisions, such high-standard people define the carrying capacity of their land at a lower figure than that agreed upon by those who want food only to live and are willing to sacrifice all recreational values to the support of more human lives. The contradiction between these two carrying capacities is a political contradiction, not a fact of natural science. If the two political views are allowed to compete with each other under laissez-faire rules, those people who accept lower standards will displace those who desire (but will not fight for) higher standards, in a sort of Gresham's Law of Living Standards. But whatever the standards—whatever the quantitative definition of carrying capacity—the transgression of carrying capacity must not be allowed because it leads to ruin. In retrospect, I see the revival of Lloyd's image of the commons and the use of this metaphor in the formulation of conservation laws as necessary measures in putting the policy sciences on the path toward a rigorous grounding in conservation principles. To the extent that we achieve this goal, we will discover that much of the vagueness and prolixity that now afflict the policy sciences will disappear. The goal is worth pursuing.
REFERENCES
Garrett Hardin, "Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept," Soundings 59(1): 120-137 ( 1976). Reprinted in Hardin, Stalking the Wild Taboo, 2nd ed. Los Altos, Calif.: Kaufmann, 1978.
David R. Klein, ``The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,,, Journal of Wildlife Management 32: 350-367 ( 1968).
Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-Wisher to Mankind, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, pp. 8, 36-38 (originally published 1786).