I first came across the term tragedy of the commons when I was working at Ecolinc, a specialist science centre at Bacchus Marsh, VIC where I was teaching and developing programs. I hadn’t heard of the term, until I was adapting a game for our Year 7s about this very concept and the term came up. In the game called Harvest, each team ran a fleet of shipping vessels, and every season the fleet went out fishing a common resource – the sea. It was intriguing listening to the teams justify the large size of their catches, and how upset some teams became when they realised the collective damage they were doing.
What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care.
Aristotle | Greek philosopher | 384–322 BC
The tragedy of the commons refers to a situation in which individuals with access to a public resource, (for example a commonly shared river, ocean, local park or forest) act in their own selfish interests and, in doing so, ultimately deplete or even destroying the very resource they are using. Potential overuse happens because individuals have the mindset of ‘well if I don’t take, someone else will’. It occurs because no single person feels solely responsible for looking after the resource, leading to its degradation through overuse. The end result being a tragedy for all.
There are so many examples of this, but one that is close to my heart and home is the collection of firewood and bark from the bushland beside my local creek. It’s only small collectors – a woman with a pram collecting small sticks with her son, a man collecting larger limbs for firewood (there are regulations for firewood collection) and others collecting leaves, bark and flowers as they walk along the track. I don’t say anything, because the battle is not worth the confrontation. But I am thinking of putting up little notices scattered in the bush about why this is not a good practice. Something along the lines of ‘When we collect sticks, logs and bark what we’re doing is taking away the little homes of the spiders, lizards, and ladybirds that live here in the bush’.
From slivers of bark for geckoes to hide beneath, grass stems for spiders to span with webs, and grassy tussocks for echidnas to seek ant nests between, the ground is a natural metropolis. Logs provide small hollows and crevices where lizards can live, the moist soil beneath logs provide a liveable space for slaters upon which the bush-stone curlew and hooded robin can feed themselves and their chicks. A frog will find refuge within the damp decaying interior of a fallen branch where it awaits a dewy evening or the next rain.
The Ground Story. Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority.
A tragedy of the commons is by no means inevitable, since the individuals concerned may be able to achieve mutual restraint by consensus or even work together to improve their local common area, as Friends of Groups and Landcare can attest. And of course, we are more aware and educated than ever before. When communities come together with a shared purpose, the results can be extraordinary, degraded land becomes thriving habitat, waterways are revived, and people rediscover their connection to place and to one another. This was evident with the game of Harvest, as time passed and we played the game over the course of years, more teams woke up quickly to the fact that they were damaging the sea and very quickly limited their catches.
Would you like a larger example? Check out Race to the Bottom ABC Four Corners (47min) and learn about Gerard Barron (CEO of The Metals Company), an Australian mining magnate, who is pushing to mine the deep sea floor in the Pacific. An intelligent man who knows perfectly well the meaning behind the tragedy of the commons but has no intention of ‘limiting his catch’ of poly-metallic nodules (fist-sized rocks on the seafloor that are rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese).
Writer: Colleen B. Filippa
With a background in Environmental Science, Colleen is the Founding Director of Fifteen Trees. In 2009, after 20 years in primary, secondary and tertiary education institutions, Colleen left the classroom. Fifteen Trees is a social enterprise assisting individuals and companies to reduce their carbon footprint by supporting community groups such as Landcare, schools and environmental networks.
