On the global scale, nations are abandoning not only the freedom of the seas, but the freedom of the atmosphere, which acts as a common sink for aerial garbage. Yet to come are many other restrictions as the world's population continues to grow. We are slow to mend our ways because ethicists and philosophers of the past generally did not see that numbers matter. In the language of 20th-century commentators, traditional thinking was magnificently verbal and deplorably nonnumerate. One of today's cardinal tasks is to marry the philosopher's literate ethics with the scientist's commitment to numerate analysis.
Words are important, but they often require a numerate cast.
European pioneers in North America thought they had been given by the land they chose to perceive as unpeopled. Even today, laws encouraging private access to public lands for mining, pasturing, and forestry perpetuate subsidies that support malfunctioning commons. Numeracy demands that we take account of the exponential growth of living systems, while acknowledging that resources, when thoroughly understood, will prove to be definable by numbers that are relatively constant. As overuse of resources reduces carrying capacity, ruin is inevitable. Science has been defined as a self-correcting system.