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A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

Garrett Hardin

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Garrett Hardin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1915
Born: April 21
Died: 2003
Died: September 14
Biologist
Demographer
Ecologist
Statistician
University Teacher
Dallas
Texas
Garrett James Hardin
Garrett J. Hardin
Coldly
Sacrifices
Obligation
Deny
Sacrifice
Future
Make
Rationalist
Individualist

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Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'
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Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
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But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
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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.
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Numeracy: 1. The art of putting numbers to things, that is, assigning amounts to variables in order that practical decisions may be reach. 2. That aspect of education (beyond mere literacy) which takes account of quantitative aspects of reality.
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Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.
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The population problem has no technical solution it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
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(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)
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Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
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We see only what we have names for.
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Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
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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.
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Value is a relative concept: the value of each action is determined by comparing it with other possible actions.
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People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
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In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable
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The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
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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.
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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.
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The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
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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.
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