The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons:

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons: 

A critique of resource sharing, western colonialism and the way human beings understand climate science

In high school you might have been familiarized with “The Tragedy of the Commons”, a thought piece by American biologist Garrett Hardin. In this thought piece he imagines a “commons” or communal land accessible to a village. Each person, Hardin supposes, will raise cattle on the commons. The commons can only support a certain number of cattle without being entirely depleted and no longer able to support any cattle. Eventually, Hardin imagines, the greed of each person will lead to a depleted commons unable to support any cattle. The moral of Hardin’s story is that population growth leads inevitably to exploitation unless regulated by the state and that humans are fundamentally greedy, terrible people with no regards for the shared resources of the air, oceans, and forests of the world.

Here’s the problem: 50% of greenhouse gasses are released into the air by the richest 10% of the population and the poorest 50% of the population releases less than 10% of all the world’s greenhouse gasses (Study here). The commons aren’t being exploited by the whole village, the commons are being grossly exploited by the richest person in the village. Whenever anyone blames climate change on population growth that person is reading some unfortunately common racist piss. It’s plenty possible to feed the entire population of the earth with green farming practices (and we literally can’t afford not to, as Bill McKibben discusses at length in his book Eaarth and article here), but it’s not possible for the earth’s resources to support people who own personal jets. 

Here’s another problem with the tragedy of the commons: people aren’t fundamentally greedy. Western colonialism is and “post”-colonialist globalism is. In Robin Kimerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass she points out that the way humans interact with the environment is a direct result of money based economies. We exchange money for goods and the transaction is over. So what happens when we come upon a non-monetized resource like the commons? We exploit it, taking and accepting that if we owed something we would pay money for it. But Kimerer comes from the Potawatomi tribe of North America where they use gift economies. Instead of money being exchanged for goods and services the people of the Potawatomi nation take (are given) gifts from the Earth in return for a relationship. If the Potawatomi tribe were given a commons, instead of taking from it indefinitely, Kimerer might argue, they would give to it in return. They would honor the commons by taking care of it, not overgrazing and replanting every spring. This view of natural resources as expendable (and with those resources, the poor black and brown people who often live on or around those resources) is one firmly rooted in white colonialist bullshit.

In Naomi Klien’s This Changes Everything she introduces the idea of “blockadia”-- a new frontline of people fighting for the climate. The people of blockadia are most often indigenous poor people of color. They fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Keystone XL Pipeline, and pipelines and other extreme methods of fossil fuel extraction in Greece, India, Canada and China. These indigenous-based movements often started as a tribe of people protecting their home and their rights to clean water or air or the land they depend on for food. In these blockadias, like the one that became the abomination that is the Alberta Tar Sands the native people (the Beaver Lake Cree tribe) are fighting for their basic human right for drinkable water against an outside force (in the tar sands it’s Shell Oil). If I was to carry this metaphor over to the commons it would be like a village that had sustainably used and coexisted with its commons for literally thousands of years before an enormous multi-million dollar company came in, poured fossil fuel all over the commons and then gleefully set in on fire.

But maybe I’m being too literal. Maybe I’m focusing on a silly, outdated metaphor. Maybe you’re convinced the idea of the tragedy of the commons is bullshit, and you’re ready to stop beating a dead metaphor and move on. Monya, you’re asking, why are you so fucked up over a metaphor? Well, hypothetical reader, it’s because the discourse of the tragedy of the commons is in most contemporary climate science and climate science communication. Al Gore, the Sierra Club and James Hansen (the American scientist who first brought climate change to the attention of congress) all list overpopulation as a leading factor of climate change. And what can you do to fight climate change? If you think: recycle, don’t litter, turn off the lights, and take shorter showers, congratulations! You’ve been indoctrinated into the tragic commons mentality. And not just you; Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Nye, Crash Course kids, and the first page of youtube results for climate change for kids all have no idea how to systemically stop and combat climate change. Not littering, recycling, and driving less are common solutions listed, it’s far more rare to see climate education urging regulation on the fossil fuel industry. Solutions like decreasing the nearly $1 trillion that fossil fuel industries are subsidized internationally annually (source), or not spending $11 billion (source) on a border wall to keep out climate refugees (source) that also wrecks ecological havoc on the local ecosystems through which it cuts (source).  

And maybe you’re considering that I should be more hopeful about individual solutions. Surely there must be a middle ground between **gasp** socialism and turning off the lights occasionally biking to work. To this I reply that any focus at all on individual ways to lessen carbon emissions is a sparkly metaphoric distraction. Any time we focus on individual solutions instead of systemic change we are distracting ourselves from the problem at hand. As much as we may have convinced ourselves that reusable straws and eating vegan can make a drop in the ocean that is the work we have to do to combat climate change, it won’t change the reality of the fossil fuel industrial complex. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two thirds of all the carbon in the atmosphere has been put there by 90 corporations (link).This is the true tragedy: that we look within ourselves and at our individual actions to preserve our commons when the solution comes from systemic change and overhaul of the entire fossil fuel and global colonialist history. 

Snow in springtime

And the snow came

On the fifth day of springtime

After the birds sang in joy at the sunshine

After the maple painted the sky pink with her blossoms

And the willow shown gold with the promise of leaves

The snow came

Steady, silent, white, and biting cold

We lit the long-abandoned fireplace 

But it wasn't enough to return our fingers from cardboard to flesh

I heard the bones of the oak tree creaking

Heard the delicate green of her buds shivering in cold

The snow kept on

Whiteness covering all and muffling our dissenting protest

Until

At the end of the second day

Of snow on the sixth day of springtime

The weight of the wet, white snow became to much for the oak to bear and she

Cracked

And fell alongside the power lines

The birds were too cold to mourn. 

At the end of the world

When most people bought up toilet paper, bottled water, canned goods at the end of the world
My mother bought up floss
She bought packs upon packs, filing our bathroom cabinet and the bed beside her drawer
"When I die," She told me, her voice colored with a relief of humor,
"I want my corpse to look nice when it smiles."

In contrast, I found myself drawn to acrylic paints
I couldn't afford it, I had lost my job two weeks before
And should have been saving my money for the toilet paper, bottled water, and canned goods that were simultaneously impossible to find and impossible to afford
Or the inevitable medical attention designed to bankrupt me and all my loved ones
Instead I bought paints
Bright yellow hues, the autumnal oranges and reds of foliage,
The deep sea blues and purples, a white snow and a charcoal black
And a green like grass in the springtime (the end of the world started in the spring time).

Maybe I thought like Monet, I could eat my colors
Imagining them sugary sweet and dripping succulence by virtue of their brightness
 Maybe I felt the urge to create at the end of days
Leave a legacy of beauty like my mother's perfect, white-toothed corpse

Perhaps I was looking to make something different, to color reality less bleak
To repaint the contagion map spring green instead of the alarming red, a warning of the disease at its peak
I would rebrand the quarintine signs with pinks and yellows of springtime flowers, paint smiles back onto the faces of worried new anchors,
To paint "open" over the "closed" stores, to paint the people back onto the streets and into the stopped trains.
I paint the sky blue and the sea purple and the grass green and the whole world alive, alive once more.

Perhaps, in a world of pain and death, I just wanted to make a little more color, a little more joyful before the end.

--written in response to the covid 19 outbreak of 2020

A Tarot Reading

Five of pentacles: Today will stretch itself out in front of you, a labyrinth or labor while you grope numbly for sleep. Steel yourself against the cold. There is work to be done and spring is not here yet.

Knight of swords: Why are you fighting? When the mob comes to your door, pitchforks in hand, how will you receive them? Why is it so hard to find what you're searching for? Are you making it harder to find then it needs to be?

Four of cups: What have you been given today? What have you seen and refused today. When you spend all day with your head in the clouds, you'll have wet feet by sundown.

Gonna write you a love poem

Title is a shout-out to Sarah Berellies' "Not Gonna Write You a Love Poem" which has rather become my anthem these days. This piece is best read aloud. 

Gonna Write You a Love Song

I keep meaning to write you a love poem where I liken you to the warm breeze of spring, or the sun setting across the soccer fields, or the smell of oranges.
I would like to write these poems for you because I think they're true and also
because I have promised them

To you.

Some days it seems poet and liar are two sides of the same sparkly coin.

My friend Kristen last night, told me she values her word above almost anything. I would like to keep the promises I make
To you. I would like
To draw them from the frozen ground like snow bells and trout lilies in the springtime.
My friend Mira says that people make decisions with three centers of the body: the mind, the heart and the gut. She tells me if these centers aren't in line I will break my promises.

It’s not that I lied about wanting to write you a love poem.
It’s just that the truth
Is one of those words I can never quite see straight on.
It blurs and spreads like ink under the spilled water on your freshly finished homework after I promised to be careful with the water near your freshly done homework.

I would like
To write you a love poem

About how your pen ink blurred and spilled across the paper like curry on your carpet that night we were watching Love Actually and you made me promise
To not spill curry on the carpet and sometimes I think my life could be seen as a list of
Foods I have spilled on other people’s
Valuables and sometimes I think our love

Is the edges of the spill,
Spreading outwards and turning your carpet a little green and making it smell a little of curry forever and
Even if we break up now your carpet will never be the same

I would like to write you a love poem
And that poem would be about how you are the springtime sunshine melting the ice of my heart And I would like
To stand on the frozen pond on the cusp of spring and not break through
But the ice is rotten and I think
Poet and bad listener may be two sides of the same sparkly coin and I think about how
I promised
To write you a love poem.
But first I have to get out of this ankle deep freezing cold water.

My feet have turned blue by the time I get out of the pond and
Then I have to tumble my socks dry and then there’s dinner and homework to think of
And I have made it out of the pond but somehow I
Left my promise to write you a love poem
Where my feet cracked through the ice.

I would like to write you a love poem on creamy paper
With a real actual calligraphy pen
But I spilled the ink and it got all over everything
My paper, my desk, my phone, my hands,

My hands

Are always
Smudged
With pen ink or with marker or with good, dark earth or with a dozen other things
I have spilled and then forgotten.
I have noticed
Your hands
Are always clean
Your nails spotless
And I know there’s a poem in the way your hands are as clear
As the sunlight climbing to the golden tree-tops to make room for the night to fall across the earth
I must be the night, forever chasing you in this metaphor
Forever promising
To write you a love poem and I think
You and the night are two sides of the same sparkly coin

Ice cream on my brother’s iphone
Peanut sauce in my mother’s fancy bag
Nail polish on my best friend’s kitchen table
Milk on my dance teacher’s cat
Salad dressing all over the MET Museum's front steps
Curry on your carpet

I promised to write you a love poem.