Читать книгу Environment and Society - Paul Robbins - Страница 68

The first applications of game theory mathematics were directed to the Cold War logic of mutual nuclear annihilation. Funded by the RAND Corporation and the US Pentagon in the 1950s, game theorists asked the unthinkable: Is it rational to strike first with nuclear weapons, not knowing whether and when the enemy might do so? Is it rational to drop the bomb?!

But what might any of this have to do with environment and society? Applying this kind of thinking to our interactions with the natural world leads to some potentially grim and tragic conclusions. For while there is a possibility of cooperation around environmental conservation, there is a potentially overriding incentive to “defect,” in the language of game theory, leading to a general inability to manage or control our consumption and use of the environment, and so to environmental destruction.

Thinking along these lines, Garrett Hardin presented one of the most compelling, persistent, and in some ways problematic arguments linking environment to society through the commons. In his article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science in 1968 (where von Neumann is prominently cited), he directed this logic to the problem of overpopulation. He argued that while the advantages for any individual or family of reproducing freely are immediate, their costs are diffused across the planet, increasing incrementally the burden of humanity upon the Earth. This is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, insofar as some people may choose to forgo more children in the interests of the planet, but others will inevitably “defect” or cop a “free ride.” The worst outcome is much more likely (now sometimes called the “Nash Equilibrium” for its mathematical discoverer John Forbes Nash, made famous in the film A Beautiful Mind), at least without some form of coercive restraint on people’s behavior. Overpopulation, as this logic goes, is inevitable without some form of enforcement mechanism (Chapter 2).

The article was made more compelling by its use of an agricultural metaphor for the problem. Rather than think directly about people’s reproduction, Hardin asked us to “picture a pasture open to all …” in which numerous herdsmen managed their individual herds. Following precisely the logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it is in the interest of each herder to increase the size of their own herd, Hardin argued, since each new animal costs him nothing but gains him much. But since all herdsmen enjoy the same incentive, the inevitable result is a destroyed pasture. Because it belongs to everyone, the resource belongs to no one, and will inevitably be grazed into destruction. In language typical of the article he explains:

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. (Hardin 1968, p. 1243)

Conscience and goodwill, Hardin further asserted, were useless in the face of compelling, internal, adaptive, evolutionary logics. Real solutions, however distasteful, must inevitably take some other form. People of the Earth must choose either coercion (“mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” p. 1247), to tyrannize ourselves into control, or turn to strict forms of private property and inheritance so that all impacts of poor decision-making will be visited only upon the owner of that property. The former approach was rejected by Hardin, as he concluded that the problem with tyranny is that there is always a possibility that a system of governance will come under the undue sway of one of the users of the commons and cannot itself be controlled: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes – ‘Who shall watch the watchers themselves?’” (pp. 1245–1246). The latter approach – privatization – was preferred and defended by Hardin since, no matter how unjust it might be (not all rich people are smart people, he pointed out: “an idiot can inherent millions,” p. 1247), such a solution was the best one available. In either case, whether state or private control, some form of enclosure was deemed as essential, where an “open access” resource is bounded and given over to control either by individual owners or by a strong state management body.

The power and influence of this argument were enormous, and remain so to this day. It continues to be perhaps the most cited academic article in the social sciences, it provided foundational arguments for fields as widespread as evolutionary biology and economics, and it is typically invoked in debates over environmental scarcity. Because Hardin convincingly used an environmental crisis as his metaphoric example, his essay on population quickly became the key defining metaphor for many people (managers and scholars) in guiding their thinking about all environmental problems more generally. Nature in all its forms (fisheries, oil fields, climate systems) might be seen as commons, those difficult-to-enclose systems that invite free-riding and defection.

Viewed this way, the solutions to environmental problems do appear to take the form Hardin suggests: either some form of environmental super-police state, or private property rights over all environmental systems or objects. Environmental commons in this way of thinking lead inevitably to tragedy and so must be made into non-commons through the power of law and property. There is close match of this way of thinking with the market logics (i.e. internalizing externalities) reviewed in Chapter 3.