"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." -- Garrett Hardin
Garrett James Hardin (21 April 1915 14 September 2003) was a leading ecologist from Dallas, Texas, who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the tragedy of the commons brought attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He was most well known for his elaboration of this theme in his 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Ecology, which states "You cannot do only one thing", and used the familiar phrase "Nice guys finish last" to sum up the "selfish gene" concept of life and evolution.
"A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.""A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.""A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.""An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.""But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.""But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.""Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.""Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.""Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.""Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?""However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.""In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.""In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.""Incommensurables cannot be compared.""Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.""It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.""Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.""No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.""Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.""The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.""The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.""The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.""The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.""The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.""To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.""Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.""Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.""You cannot do only one thing."
Hardin received a B.S. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and a PhD in microbiology from Stanford University in 1941. Moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1946, he served there as Professor of Human Ecology from 1963 until his (nominal) retirement in 1978. He was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.
A major focus of his career, and one to which he returned repeatedly, was the issue of human overpopulation. This led to writings on controversial subjects such as abortion, which earned him criticism from the political right, and immigration and sociobiology, which earned him criticism from the political left. In his essays he also tackled subjects such as conservation and creationism.
In 1974 he published the article "Living on a Lifeboat" in BioScience magazine, arguing that contributing food to help the Ethiopian famine would add to overpopulation, which he considered the root of Ethiopia's problems. Despite his lifelong insistence that population must be curbed to avoid disaster, Hardin himself had five children.
In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to race and intelligence following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.
Hardin, who suffered from a heart disorder, and his wife Jane, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease, were members of End-of-Life Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society (now Compassion & Choices), and believed in individuals choosing their own time to die. They committed suicide in their Santa Barbara home in September 2003, shortly after their 62nd wedding anniversary. He was 88 and she was 81.
1965, Nature and Man's Fate New American Library. ISBN 0-451-61170-5
1972, Exploring new ethics for survival: the voyage of the spaceship Beagle Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-30268-6
1973, Stalking the Wild Taboo W. Kaufmann. ISBN 0-913232-03-3
1977, The Limits of Altruism: an Ecologist's view of Survival Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-33435-7
1980, Promethean Ethics: Living With Death, Competition, and Triage University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-95717-4
1982, Naked Emperors: Essays of a Taboo-Stalker William Kaufmann, Inc. ISBN 0-86576-032-2
1985, Filters Against Folly, How to Survive despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent Viking Penguin. ISBN 0-670-80410-X
1993, Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509385-2
1999, Our Population Myopia Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512274-7
Hardin's last book The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia (1999), a warning about the threat of overpopulation to the Earth's sustainable economic future, called for coercive constraints on "unqualified reproductive rights" and argued that affirmative action is a form of racism.
Selected journal articles
1960. "The Competitive Exclusion Principle", Science131, 1292-1297. . .
1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science162, 1243-1248. . .
1969. "Not peace, but ecology". Brookhaven Symposia in Biology22, 151-161. .
1970. "Everybody's guilty. The ecological dilemma". California medicine112 (5), 40-47. . .
1971. "Population, biology and law". Journal of Urban Law48, 563-578.
1974. "Living on a lifeboat" Bioscience24, 561-568. .
1974. "the Case Against Helping the Poor". Psychology Today, 8, 38-43.
1976. "Living with Faustian Bargain". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists32, 25-29.
1980. "Ecology and the death of Providence". Zygon15, 57-68.
1985. "Human-ecology - the subversive, conservative science". American Zoologist25, 469-476.
1986. "Cultural carrying-capacity - a biological approach to human problems". Bioscience36, 599-606.
1994. "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons". Trends in Ecology & Evolution9, 199.
1998. "Extensions of 'The Tragedy of the Commons'". Science280, 682-683.
Chapters in books
1991. Paramount positions in ecological economics. In Costanza, R. (editor) Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability, New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-07562-6
1991. In: R. V. Andelson, (editor), Commons Without Tragedy, London : Shepheard-Walwyn , pp. 162—185. ISBN 0-389-20958-9 (U.S.)
