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The commons and OVERGRAZING:

http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/overgraz.htm

What do we mean by “overgrazing?” Basically the presence of too many animals on the land or for too long or at inappropriate seasons, such that the land becomes degraded.

Degradation of rangelands involves deterioration in:

quality and then in

quantity of upland and riparian vegetation

Garrett Hardin, writing in his classic “Tragedy of the Commons” (assigned reading for week 1) used the example of grazing to illustrate his point that people will tend to abuse “commons” (resources that are owned by no one, but utilized by everyone). The concept of grazing lands as commons could apply to rangelands such as public grazing lands in the US, or pasture lands in many lesser developed nations where the poor don’t own their own land. (While grazing on federal lands leased to ranchers is regulated in the US [more so than in many other areas of world], the adequacy of this regulation for protecting these “commons” is increasingly questioned.)

Hardin’s example goes like this:

(1) each family puts one cow out on the commons

(2) then somebody gets the idea to put two cows out and does so

(3) then everybody else also puts two cows out, and so forth.

As this process continues, the number of cattle gradually increases tremendously. People can see that the range is deteriorating, but they keep adding cattle anyway. Why would they do this?

Think about it from the perspective of any one cattle owner. Is it still advantageous to him/her to add more animals as long as others are continuing to do so, or would he/she be better off pulling some cattle off to decrease pressure on the land and vegetation? Economically (and over the short term) he/she will still earn more from two cows (or more) than from one! That is, Hardin argues, there is no incentive to be conserving in a commons. The individual who decreased his/her herd to try to save the land would be financially penalized

Hardin concludes that it is virtually inevitable that people will overexploit a commons, and that we cannot expect them to limit their use of the commons because doing so goes against their economic self-interest. The logical consequence is that the commons must be regulated by an outside party.

We could think of our air and water as examples of commons. Were they kept clean of pollutants without regulation? Of course not; decreasing pollutant emissions worked against the economic interests of industries and cities (at least in the short term)! Hence, these commons were only cleaned up in the US when we passed air and water quality legislation (the clean air and clean water acts); that is, these commons had to be regulated to force their clean up!