Chief Seattle and the Tragedy of the Commons: Ownership vs. Stewardship

As capitalists first and Americans second, we believe strongly in the concept of ownership. We own and use the Earth and the material goods Earth's raw materials help us produce, and feel a proprietary command over them. When Communism developed as an alternative to the concept of unadulterated ownership, we responded with the fear and anger of one whose child had been taken.

Ownership of the land, its materials and its spoils are more integral to American society and thought than any other characteristics or facets. However, this concept is subject to the limitations and inevitable truth of the tragedy of the commons, and we will eventually be dupes to this incontrovertible logic.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The "commons" is any kind of resource which is divided up and shared by a group of people. Such things as the air we breathe and the water we drink derive from the commons. In many areas of the world, new physical land for farming and grazing land for farmers' stock, fish from the sea and wood for various fuels and housing are treated as commons, and owned by all.

The logic of the commons functions in this particular manner: Each household on Earth has the right to plunder resources from and deposit wastes into the commons. To accumulate wealth, resources and material goods, every household feels that it can acquire one resources unit or dump one waste unit while distributing one unit of cost across all households with which the commons itself is shared. In this manner, the gain to the household...

"Some households accumulate wealth more rapidly than others and this, in turn, gives them the means to access an even larger share of the commons." (Harding, 1997)
The logical error in the commons lies in our failure to realize and internalize that all households are attempting to accomplish the same exact thing. "Thus, on average, one unit of gain for a household actually produces a net one unit of cost for each household. However, selfish households accumulate wealth from the commons by acquiring more than their fair share of the resources and paying less than their fair share of the total costs. Ultimately, as population grows and greed runs rampant, the commons collapses and ends in "the tragedy of the commons." (Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243, 1968).

The logic of the commons as described above collapses when resources decline and/or population grows too large. Consider the following example:

Fourteenth century England was set up as a loosely connected collection of villages, each with its own common pasture for villagers to graze horses, cattle and sheep. Each household attempted to gain wealth by placing as many of the animals on the commons as it could afford. As the village exploded in size and more and more creatures were located on the commons by the villagers, overgrazing destroyed the pasture. No livestock could be supported on the commons after that. As a direct ramification of population growth, greed, and the logic of the commons, village after village collapsed in medieval England.

An seemingly foolproof response to avoid…