Disregard for environment

Anshu Gupta
When environment is treated as a common property, the problem arises. Public space is important but must be taken care of. This topic is extremely important in understanding the degradation of the environment. Basic idea behind this topic is that if a resource is held in common for use by all, then ultimately that resource will be destroyed. Common Resources include atmosphere, rivers, oceans, lakes, forests and fish. The freedom in common brings ruin to all.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote the famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Property that many people hold in common will be destroyed or atleast overused until it deteriorates. The Ancient Greek Philosopher Aristotle said “What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” Common signifies the resource that is owned by no-one or owned by a group, all of whom have access to the resource. Tragedy doesn’t need to follow from greed. Any sustained increase in population in a finite biosystem ends in tragedy. Tragedy is logically dependent only on the assumption that there is a steady growth in the use of resources within any finite ecosystem. There is depletion and deterioration of a shared resource by individual, acting for his self ineterst, acting contrary to the groups long term best interest by depleting the commons. The same concept is often cited in connection with sustainable development.
Earth’s atmosphere is a resource that everyone on the planet uses and abuses. Air pollution and green house gases from various industries and transportation damage its valuable shared resource. Public roads are an excellent example of common property shared by many people. Each of them has his/her own interest in mind, typically how to get to work as quickly and easily as possible. This leads to traffic congestion, road jams etc thus slowing down overall traffic movement, filling the air with pollutants from idling cars. Population growth is also considered as an example of tragedy of commons by some scientists. In this case, planet earth is the common resource and its resources are shared by all. Examining population growth as a tragedy of commons illustrates that the depletion of common resources isn’t always the result of greed. Just by existing, each person uses water, air, land and food resources. The more people there are, the less each person’s share must be.
History shows that early civilization paid dearly from their disregard for environment. The skeletons of buildings from the ancient cities still stand in deserts that were once rich forests or fertile grasslands. Most of the Iran and Iraq, now barren desert, once supported cattle, farms and forests. Greece and Rome fell, historians believe, partly because of the rampant misuse of their lands. The tragedy of the commons is the cumulative result of the self surviving tendencies of the human (greed), as well as of ignorance, competitiveness, and lack of regulation. Many factors contribute to the environmental problems facing the world’s people today. People are complex as are the systems; so are the issues. The logic that compels people to abuse communal holdings has been with humankind as long as common property has.  Communal resources often deteriorate as individuals become caught up in a cycle of self-gratification. Personal gain dictates actions that have negative effects shared by all who use communal property. Today, the process has reached epic proportions. The tragedy of commons provides partial explanation for many of the world’s problems, from air pollution to the rapid increase in human population. Today, too many people depend on the biosphere for food, water, and other resources, and cumulative effect of many small insults has become staggering. Local problems have spawned regional calamities. Regional problems are now spreading to create global concerns.
We are in the transition stage. Environmental problems have become so widespread that they demand large scale regional and global solutions. Instead of using Earth’s resources in a wasteful and inefficient manner, it is important to use resources in a sustainable manner. In the pursuit of indefinite sustainability, we must learn to not look at things from an individual stand point but from a global stand point. To avoid the ultimate destruction of the resources, we must change our values and ideas of morality. We can avoid the tragedy only by altering our values, by changing the way we live as there is no other scientific way to solve this problem.
(The author is Research scholar School of Environmental Sciences JNU)

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