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.