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We can't cure a shortage by increasing the supply.

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
Shortage
Supply
Increasing
Cure
Cures

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Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.
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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.
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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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Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'
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A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.
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You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.
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Ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor speciality.
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The greatest folly is to accept expert statements uncritically. At the very least, we should always seek another opinion.
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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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In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable
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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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Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
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The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.
Garrett Hardin
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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?
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In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.
Garrett Hardin
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The population problem has no technical solution it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
Garrett Hardin
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The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings.
Garrett Hardin
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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.
Garrett Hardin
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The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
Garrett Hardin
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Value is a relative concept: the value of each action is determined by comparing it with other possible actions.
Garrett Hardin