Monthly Memos

Stewardship Or Tragedy?

Charles I. Mundale
Executive Director of MCCR

May 1992

"The common good is best secured by the pursuit of private interest." This is an article of capitalist faith. Trust the Unseen Hand; it will provide. Yet: polluted air in Los Angeles, fouled lakes in northern Minnesota, eroded fields in southern Minnesota, flooded tunnels in Chicago, and exploding sewers in Guadalajara are convincing -- and geographically diverse enough to be general -- evidence that this bedrock belief of history's most productive economic system "ain't necessarily so." Not in all cases anyway. And what links these cases is that they all involve endowments held, in one way or another, in common.

Nearly 25 years ago, ecologist Garrett Hardin called attention to the cold logic that leads to these unhappy outcomes. In "The Tragedy of the Commons" (Science, Dec. 1968), Hardin used the example of the common pasture to demonstrate that individual farmers would be led by rational self interest to overgraze -- and thus to destroy -- their commonly held resource.

By adding an animal to his herd, the individual farmer can expect to reap all of the additional income resulting from it. The cost of feeding the animal, however, will be shared equally by all members of the community. Adding an animal -- and then another and another -- is thus "the only sensible course to pursue," Hardin reasoned. Clearly rational behavior by the individual thus leads to tragedy for the community.

The way out of this dilemma, Hardin suggested, is to hold as little as possible in common, a solution that seems to restore confidence in the Unseen Hand. Indeed, private property has been an important component of the industrial revolution. From the English enclosure movement to the American Homestead Act, capitalist governments have made private ownership an objective of public policy.

But the logic lurking in the tragedy of the commons is still with us. It is with us because there are parts of planet earth -- air and water -- that simply cannot be privatized or even nationalized. The logic even affects our use of private property. Rational decisions to enhance profits for this and past generations have allowed Midwestern topsoil literally to go south, forever unavailable to coming generations.

Village commons were part of life in Europe for six centuries. Perhaps the villagers, who had not heard of Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith, were not as given to rational self-interest as the eminent theorists assumed. Perhaps their communal instincts included a sense of stewardship.

After two centuries of rational self-interest, the environmental crisis is now forcing us to recognize that much of the earth can only be held in common, and unless our rights of ownership are balanced by the obligations of stewardship, we will very likely destroy it.

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