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Next up in the series of posts on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the last post is here ) is the article of my co-editor for the volume, Carol Rose, "Commons and Cognition" . The abstract: Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons primarily concerns actions rather than thoughts. But he did famously describe the cognitive state of a hypothetical herder on a grassy field. With respect to the field and its other users, Hardin’s herder is both ignorant and indifferent; he coolly calculates that his best option is to take the full benefit of grazing his stock while suffering only a fraction of the cost — an action that contributes to the decimation of a common resource. While Hardin viewed the herder’s attitude as identical to that of actors in many other collective action situations, the work of other commons theorists suggests several different cognitive stances among such actors, largely depending on the scale of the commons issues they face. Thus participants in t

Richard Frank recently posted at Legal Planet on the 50th anniversary of the enactment of the US Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Some excerpts: 1968 was an especially tumultuous year in modern American history.  The nation endured the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; then-President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection due to growing public dissatisfaction with the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War; and protests and riots consumed Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and many other American cities. So it was in stark contrast and a most welcome development when in 1968 Congress passed, and (in October of that year) a lame duck President Johnson signed into law the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act ....  The Act represented a major political and conservation achievement 50 years ago.  It remains an important cornerstone of America’s conservation efforts a half century later. ***** Under the WSRA, rivers are classified as wild, scenic or rec

Next in our series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the last post is here ) is Michel Morin's "Indigenous Peoples, Political Economists and the Tragedy of the Commons" . The abstract: In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin implicitly moved from bounded commons — a pasture or a tribe’s territory — to the case of boundless commons — the ocean, the atmosphere and planet Earth. He insisted on the need for imposing limits on the use of these resources, blurring the difference between communal property and open access regimes. The success of his paper is due in great measure to his neglect of economic, scientific, legal  and anthropological literature. His main lifelong focus was on limiting population growth. He could have avoided the conceptual confusion he created by turning to well-known political economists such as John Locke and Adam Smith or, for that matter, jurists, such as Blackstone. Instead, he simply envisioned indigenous lands as an unbou

Construction crane at Norris Dam (TVA) ( Currents of Change ) Yesterday's New York Times  had a piece by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway on the need for government help in making the technological transformations necessary to avert disastrous climate change - in particular, phasing out fossil fuels by the year 2050. They write: None of the major technological transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries were the product of the private sector acting alone and responding only to the market. Railroads, radio, telegraph, telephone, electricity and the internet were all the result of public-private partnerships. None was delivered by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. All involved significant interventions by the visible hand of government. What does this mean for us? Right now, government is widely seen as inefficient and ineffective, and our needs are thought to be best addressed by the private sector, through entrepreneurship, venture capital and Silicon Valley-style “disrupt

Continuing the series on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50" (the last post is here ), Fabien Locher's "Historicizing Elinor Ostrom: Urban Politics, International Development and Expertise in the U.S. Context (1970-1990)"  provides interesting historical context for the work of Ostrom and the huge body of commons studies she inspired. The abstract: The goal of this article is to write a social and political history of the now preeminent approach to the ‘commons’ institutions, by focusing on Elinor Ostrom’s contributions to its development. My methodology is that of Science and Technology Studies (STS). I focus here on the materiality of E. Ostrom and her team’s research practices (fieldwork, data collecting, indexing and analysis), on their intellectual and institutional strategies, their networking practices, how their research was funded, and their interactions with administrative and academic institutions and actors (USAID, NSF, National Academy of Sciences).

Andy Seal at US Intellectual History Blog posted an interesting piece on William Cronon's extremely influential  Nature's Metropolis  (1991) earlier this week. It's a rich piece, covering a lot of topics, but it's his discussion of Cronon and commodification that I thought particularly relevant for those of us interested in the intersection of environment, law, and history. Some excerpts: [Jeffrey] Sklansky argued that one of the reasons why commodification has become such an important frame for new histories of capitalism is because—unlike proletarianization—it seems to have no necessary boundaries. This boundlessness is quite different from the implicit premises of a narrative focused on proletarianization. Labor history and business history—as they were written up through, say, the 1990s—thrived on drawing distinctions, on identifying stages of development and differentia specifica . The most important distinction, perhaps, was between the human and the nonhuman: pr