Idaho-The CIEDRA State and OTHER SMALL TRAGEDIES

In 1968, a professor of human ecology named Garrett Hardin published an essay titled, The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin showed how humans, acting in their own self-interest, would inevitably wreck any resource held in common with other humans. Sharing, in spite of what we all learned in kindergarten, would result in the destruction of wilderness or clean water or forests or fish stocks, simply because these things don't grow with population and in the absence of constraint, an individual who takes more than his share benefits more than the individual who doesn't.

Hardin viewed human nature as nasty and brutish, but The Tragedy of the Commons has become one of the sacred texts of …