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# The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons

Michael Hochberg, James Brown

► To cite this version:

Michael Hochberg, James Brown. The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, 2014, 7, pp.86-88. 10.4033/iee.2014.7.19.e . hal-02015247

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https://hal.umontpellier.fr/hal-02015247

Submitted on 10 Jan 2022

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*Guest Editorial*

# The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons

Michael E. Hochberg and James H. Brown

Michael E. Hochberg (mhochberg@univ-montp2.fr), Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution, Université Montpellier II, Place Eugène Bataillon, CC065, 34095 Montpellier Cedex 5, France and Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 USA

James H. Brown, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 USA and University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131

Humanity is playing out the tragedy of the commons on a global scale. At present rates, each individual added to the global human population will annually consume about 0.5 tonnes of cereal grain, 0.05 tonnes of meat or fish, 1 million litres of water, 0.3 tonnes of wood, 4.5 barrels of oil, 0.3 tonnes of copper, and 0.2 tonnes of phosphate fertilizer, and each one will release about 5 tonnes of CO₂ and 4 tonnes of solid and liquid waste into the environment. If these numbers seem large, multiply each of them by 2,000,000,000 to estimate the additional consumption by 2050 when the global population has grown from its current 7.1 billion to over 9 billion (UN 2010). The resulting numbers are almost incomprehensible.

The bottom line is that enormous quantities of natural resources will need to be extracted from the earth to support projected population growth (e.g., Brown et al. 2011). Additional quantities, especially of energy and metals, will be required to increase overall standards of living and to reduce poverty and disease, especially in developing countries. How can these resources be obtained, and at what cost to the environment and biodiversity of the planet (e.g., Wackernagel and Rees 1998, IPCC 2007)? Several approaches have addressed these issues: limits to food supplies (e.g., Pauly et al. 2005, Godfray et al. 2010, Foley et al. 2011, Tilman et al. 2012), supply and distribution of fresh water (Gleick and Palaniappan 2010), availability of alternative sources of energy (e.g., Hall and Klitgaard 2011), and threats from chronic and pandemic diseases (Heymann 2003, Osterholm 2005). A few efforts been made to provide more comprehensive analyses of multiple

limiting factors, perhaps most notably the ecological footprint approach of the group at the University of British Columbia (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/) and the planetary boundaries analyses of Stockholm Resilience Center (Rockström et al. 2009). Nevertheless, most of the attention has been piece-meal—focused on specific problems such as greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, and the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza.

## What is needed

We need a comprehensive global assessment of the capacity of the Earth to sustainably support current and projected levels of human population and economic activity. What quantities of resources, levels of pollution, and impacts on biodiversity will likely accompany different scenarios of growth and development? To what extent have we depleted the stocks of non-renewable resources (oil, gas, coal, phosphate, metal ores, rare earths, radio-nucleotides), and what are the energy and economic costs of finding and extracting the remaining, increasingly remote and dispersed reserves? To what extent are we overexploiting potentially renewable resources (arable land, fresh water, fisheries, wood), and what changes, including recycling, will be required to insure sustainable yields? In addition to CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses, what other pollutants most threaten human wellbeing locally, regionally, and globally?

What is also largely missing is a rigorous, quantitative, complex systems “big picture” synthesis of the
multiple inter-connected, non-linear ways that humans
are impacting the planet by depleting resources, dis-
charging pollutants, and altering biodiversity, and of the
implications of these activities for the future of human-
kind (Pereira et al. 2010, Milanović 2011, Barnosky et
al. 2012). Increasing subsidies of water, fertilizer, and
fossil fuels will be required to increase the productivity
of limited arable land and rural farmers to feed a
growing global population. Vast quantities of energy
will be required to power the industrial-technological-
informational economies of the most developed nations.
The products of developed nations—farm machinery,
solar panels, irrigation pumps, drugs, vaccines, cell
phones, and the internet—will be required to fight pov-
erty, malnutrition, and diseases in the developing world.
A natural disaster, disease epidemic, or regional unrest
could trigger acute shortages in supplies of fossil fuel,
spreading warfare, or an economic crash. And even
modest, sustained economic stagnation will result in
substantial cutbacks in social services and research and
development, leading in turn to curtailed investment in
extracting scarce resources and reduced capacity to
respond to natural disasters and regional conflagrations.

There are signs that these kinds of interacting limits
and feedbacks are already occurring—witness the effect
of unrest in the Middle East and changes in the strategic
actions of a number of major actors on volatility in the
price of oil, food shortages and political instability in
the Horn of Africa, and the global spread and anemic
delayed recovery of the economic downturn triggered
by the housing bubble in the U.S. Such impacts can be
expected to become more frequent and severe in the
future as the human population and economy puts more
strain on the Earth's life support systems. The
probability of a “global tipping point”—a catastrophic
collapse—is increasing (Barnoski et al. 2012). So far,
however, the public is largely unaware of the complex-
ity of these problems, and the press, policymakers, and
politicians do not encourage enlightenment and discus-
sion. There is little appreciation of the global scale of
human-environment interactions and the interconnect-
edness of the modern world that will determine the
future of humankind.

Can we prevent the tragedy of the commons that
appears to be inevitable?

History teaches us that humans often over-exploited
their local environments. Populations survived by mig-
rating to unexploited areas or by importing resources to
compensate for local depletion and exporting wastes to
avoid local pollution. These strategies worked so long as
there were new areas to colonize and new resources to
extract from them.

Now, however, the world is full of humans and the
remaining stocks of natural resources are being rapidly

depleted. The bounty of the Earth is finite and humans
are increasingly pressing up against the global limits. To
the extent that humans have been able to enforce
regulations to prevent the tragedy of the commons, these
successes have mostly been local and temporary.
Because they limit individual freedom, regulations must
either be enforced autocratically from above, like
China's one-child policy, or be accepted democratically
because people recognize that public good outweighs
self-interest, like collecting taxes to pay for parks and
social services. But the capacity to sacrifice for other
humans and for the well-being of the planet is jeopard-
ized because global resource scarcity brings out narrow
self-interests—of individuals, communities, and nations.
The kinds of actions that might avert collapse, such as a
global one-child policy and strict limits on greenhouse
gas emissions, are all but impossible to implement,
because the forces of greed and competition will always
trump the virtues of thrift and caring and the voices of
optimism will always trump the voices of “doom and
gloom.” If ultimately the population must decrease to be
sustainable, then the question is whether this will be a
consequence of wars, poverty and pandemics, or
whether humanity can show collective intelligence and
avoid learning from major or catastrophic mistakes.

Acknowledgements

We thank Alain Kirman for his input, and the CNRS
(PICS 06313) for funding.

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