You are right to point that out. There is some truth in the tragedy of commons argument – Ostrom herself has emphasized that there is limited scope for communal approaches to the commons governance problem. However, it is important to know that it is possible to manage them so.

@ Steve Chase:

Hardin was by no means a “tool” of Capitalism. However, his analysis of the commons dilemma was overly pessimistic and didn’t allow for “communal” solutions – indeed, while reading his “Tragedy of Commons” I had the impression that he was a deep misanthrope, not really believing in humanity’s “good sides”.

However, we would be wise to recognize there is some truth to the tragedy of the commons. Just as we have capacity to be rational and collaborative, we also have the capacity to be selfish and short-sighted.

We should expect more of ourselves, but guard against our destructive weaknesses.

Dave Gardner
Director of the documentary
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth

Imagine more people living a better life while using LESS energy. Without efficiency, there is no hope to live in a steady state economy. Proofs of point are the electric car and the led (which are about 4 x and 12 times more efficient than what they will replace, respectively).
However, clean energy needs lots of powerlines and space… but still, that’s BETTER than accelerating CO2 content in our air and the massive amount of local enviro damage by extracting and using fossil fuels.
Of course, there is the option (I mean the faint hope) of closed cycle molten salt thorium reactors… This would cut down on desert solar, powerlines and XSCO2.
Whatever the best choice though, it has to delete fossil fuels before we let them delete us in subsequent depletion years (and it would be nice to use that store for non burning purposes during the interim period of learning how not to need them all together)!

And I am afraid that we somehow have to delete money, as marketing 101 clearly points to an over excess of everything which is designed to fail in a set amount of time. This, I assume many already know.
Food is raised and grown for money, not for consideration of efficiency (well maybe due to the costs of inefficiency). Same with the very structure of our cities and towns.
Until humanity can collectively focus on (figuring out how to get to) the most efficient social structure, only then does “lifestyle” have a meaningful overall relevance towards sustainability.

Imagine a society which does not have personal money (I know this is still “impossible” and have not considered it on an academic level)!
By that I mean, everybody has equal ownership of “the state” and thus ALL monies are collectively, the state’s. With that, purchasing power goes to the betterment of the state, which inturn provide individuals with all that they need, albeit on an ordered and structured way.
The people willing to test this new social structure would essentially (be hoping to) be rich slaves for themselves!
Imagine all the things money can’t buy… Large renewable energy installations, free higher education, and eventually, expansion out into the solar system itself… It also would permit the mass manufacture of “everything” needed (such as cell phones, smart TV’s and cars) to be as efficient and long lasting as possible. Machines would eventually make “everything”, yet this would be the way (the only way I can see) to sidestep unemployment cause by such machines already being developed!

A closer to home (yet still far out) scenario would be that the “state” exports a single machine made commodity, such as 30% efficient GaAs fresnel arrays for literally pennies on the dollar. Since only the state could profit, and since only the people would control the state (keep them internet lines in good shape!), retail would become a thing of the past. By virtue of the co-op concept, it seems this concept would eventually prevail over personal money (at least for the majority in our economic systems).
From there, more machines are made that displace more jobs, allowing time to work on the development of yet more machines… because eventually, there will be no monies coming into the state when all other countries convert over too.

All we need from Earth are the seeds, underground mining, water and air (and sunlight). No more “marketing” the wholesale slaughter of the environment, just a little detriment due to the erection of solar arrays (which do not need bulldozed land), and or molten salt reactors (the citizens would still “need” sunlight!). Food would be hydroponically grown, same with meat? using (high power and wavelength specific) leds as artificial sunlight within large buildings. Eventually, less energy would be required as the “cheapest, easiest way” to promote “turn around” would no longer make any sense! The building of giant “3d cities” (out of graphine?) would allow “local economy” efficiencies too (not to mention smog free electric car transportation that negotiates on VERTICAL pathways and many hundreds of levels as well as wonderful views).

I would call this future social structure a “machine economy based on available resources”.

As far as the wealthy developing an awareness. An in-law of mine worked at NOLS, an outdoor recreation organization, and grew up with not insignificant financial privileges. I was happy to learn that she is a fan of organic foods.
I recall that at least one of the Rockefeller descendants became a conservation biologist, as did one of Ted Turner’s sons, and Paul Newman’s daughter who heads an organic food branch of Newman’s Own Co.

It seems to me an important way to alert people who are not so directly oriented is through clear accounts of pollution and degradation versus environmentally sustainable production. Even organic agriculture needs to be integrated with a more comprehensive vision of agroecology. In southern Brazil, at least one area requires a sizeable portion of untouched land by local small farmers.

In my graduate studies, especially thanks to Clive Ponting’s book Green History of the World, I extended my awareness of the significance of Love Canal, NY and the toxic waste crisis there that exploded in 1978, to the racial significance of a North Carolina incident in the 1980s that lead to the founding of the EPA’s office of Environmental Justice. Then there are European incidents like the 1970s Seveso and 1980s Basel, besides Chernobyl. This doesn’t even include reference to Cleveland’s Erie River fires of the 1960s. The Latin American region has a reference in a 1980s disaster at Cubatao, Sao Paulo, Brazil. All this in addition to the Superfund tracking website developed by Environmental Defense Fund, now maintained by another NGO, called “scorecard” or something as memory serves.

Ultimately, these accounts give environmentalists like McKibben, Dietz, and the rest of us ways to paint pictures and tell stories that can help anchor other people who haven’t quite made it to safe harbor. As for Cap’n Crunch (Crunchberry!) and the like, I’ve seen organic cereal venturing into chocolate flavoring last I recall. The health food companies represent that other aspect, the social one, that is actually inseparable from the ecological one. By supporting more companies, we get closer to one of the principles behind sustainability, broader experience of participation, not of consumer fantasy. At times I put my own organic chocolate powder on granola with milk to relive the carefree days of childhood. Cocoa Pebbles from the Flintstones in a homemade cereal concoction (hcc). That’s how we can create a wake up call benefiting from the appeal of popular cartoon images to hcc. That’s the solidarity ecological economy underlying the steady state concept, it seems to me.

In a prescient 1971 essay, “National Economy: How High Is Up?” Professor Herman Daly deplored the received wisdom that robust, unlimited economic growth was not only possible but desirable and suggested in its stead a stationary-state economy where zero growth of population and the economy is not only desirable but necessary to avoid the depletion of our environmental resources. He added that the only disagreements that could exist among reasonable people were (a) what levels of population and wealth to stop at, and (b) how fast to decelerate to zero growth. It is now twenty-nine years since he made his observation, and the developed world, and more and more of the developing world, are pursuing growth of the now global economy as the panacea to our problems. With the trickle-down, rising tide, and invisible hand all will be right with the world.
Three factors in this race to oblivion stand out.
The first is wealth. Since 1971 the Dow Jones Industrial Average (shown on the top of Figure 1) has gone exponentially from what appeared then as an impenetrable 1000-point ceiling to finally bursting through the 10,000-point level as if it was just another ho-hum milestone to. . .where? There is almost a unanimous feeling in the Market that it has no ceiling. A new Internet stock bursts onto the scene with an initial public offering, or just a well-timed press release, and over night the total worth of the company is greater than that of the old reliables that actually make something and show a profit doing it. With respect to economics, I know that the exponential curve we are riding is not, and I hate to use the much-abused term, sustainable.
The second factor in this race to nowhere is population. (This exponential curve is show on the bottom of Figure 1, p3.) Some say that the explosion is over. (Ben J. Wattenberg, The Population Explosion Is Over. New York Times, 11/23/97) If the curve of the developed countries is a harbinger for the rest of the world, there may be a little room for optimism–that is, if we can get the developing countries developed. This will not be an easy task, however, in light of the crash of the Asian Tigers in 1997.
The last horse of the troika I’m examining is the emission of carbon dioxide, the so-called “global warming factor.” The environmentalists have been wringing their hands over this for at least ten years, and rightly so. In spite of industrialists’ self-interested doubts and foot-dragging, the majority of the scientific community believes it’s a very big problem. But to concentrate on the reduction of greenhouse gases is to miss the point. The world’s industrial might is not producing carbon dioxide to create a warmer climate any more than the producers of herbicides, pesticides, and other widely used chemicals are deliberately trying to reduce the sperm count of male animals, including me. The production of carbon dioxide is a by-product of the production of stuff, and the transporting of ourselves and our stuff, from place to place in a most environmentally unfriendly manner.
If global warming were the only concern, we could greatly reduce the production of carbon dioxide by converting all the means of generating electricity to hydro, solar, or nuclear power. (Nuclear and hydro power have a host of their own problems, but the production of carbon dioxide is not one of them.) And we could further reduce the production of carbon dioxide by using natural gas to fuel at the least our mass transportation.
Even if we were successful in making the above changes, we would still be producing and transporting stuff at a prodigious rate, and that is the big problem that we all face and are all a part of. We have got to look at the curve of carbon dioxide production as the basic indicator of stuff production and at global warming only as a by-product.
Consider the curves of population and carbon dioxide emissions: The 1.25 billion people of the developed world are now causing about 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide to be emitted per year. That’s about 3.2 tons per person. If the people of the developing countries were causing the emissions of carbon dioxide at the same rate, the total world emissions would be 18.3 billion tons per year. My graph paper isn’t long enough to accommodate that data point That’s a lot of stuff. It certainly could not happen overnight or in the next generation. But there is no doubt in the minds of those riding the Dow curve that it’s possible, and we are heading there with reckless abandon.
To thwart this race to oblivion we must focus on limiting the production of stuff. Global warming (and maybe population) might just take care of itself. Of course, limiting production means looking hard at a stationary-state economy and the limit to wealth. A commitment to limiting wealth in turn suggests a more equitable sharing of that wealth with its corollary, a simpler life style. This will impose a heavy and delicate demand on our moral resources. Professor Daly concludes his essay: “One thing at least seems clear–a physically stationary economy must be a morally growing economy. If this means that economists should begin to study ethics and theology, then so be it. That is where economics began.”

James T. Dette
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