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In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

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
Individual
Action
World
Intolerable
Competitive
Limited
Total
Resources
Freedom

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The population problem has no technical solution it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
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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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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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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.
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In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.
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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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The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
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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.
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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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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.
Garrett Hardin
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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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But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
Garrett Hardin
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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
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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.
Garrett Hardin
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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.
Garrett Hardin
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No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
Garrett Hardin
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A finite world can support only a finite population therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
Garrett Hardin
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The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
Garrett Hardin
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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.
Garrett Hardin
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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.
Garrett Hardin