The Republicans and the Tragedy of the Commons

Every once in a while, someone invents an operative metaphor, and is gratefully remembered ever after. Garrett Hardin did it in 1968 when he wrote his article Tragedy of the Commons.

Hardin postulated an agrarian community where all citizens graze their livestock on a commonly owned field. The field can only support a limited number of animals before it is denuded and ruined.

Hardin pointed out that the cost benefit analysis performed by an individual townsperson using the commons will always lead to the conclusion that the immediate benefit of adding another animal far outweighs the remoter, less visible harm of degradation of the commons. Whats more, the benefit from the additional animal belongs to the townsperson alone, while the harm to the commons is shared proportionally across all its users.

Looked at from a slightly different perspective, the tragedy of the commons is an illustration of a Prisoner's Dilemma. Adding an animal is playing the betrayal card, while all players deciding not to add an animal represents cooperation in preserving the resource.

It seems self-evident to me that Republican environmental policy promotes the tragedy of the commons. The Contract Republicans, by moving to slash the government's role in environmental protection, are putting the decision-making back in the "invisible hand" of the marketplace, which will always, inevitably decide to add that additional animal to the commons. One wishes that politics included an annual ritual in which all of our elected officials took scopalomine, then answered questions. I would like to hear Mr. Gingrich's honest critique of Hardin's metaphor.

I looked at Mr. Gingrich's To Renew America (Harper Collins 1995) hoping to find the answer. Sure enough, he has a chapter entitled "Tending the Gardens of the Earth: Scientifically Based Environmentalism". But, like most of the rest of the book, its a lot of empty words; he never so much as acknowledges that there is a tragedy going on. Instead, in classic Gingrichian style, he's all over the map, alternating between homely (and somewhat strange) anecdotes, attacks on his adversaries, and crackpot recommendations:

First, he establishes his own credentials as an environmentalist; he caught snakes as a kid, and has donated some animals to the Atlanta Zoo.
However, "man dominates the planet". Though we have "an absolute obligation to minimize damage to the natural world," he is "not a preservationist," which, to him, means acting "as if we don't exist". A veiled reference to "natural rhythms....of which we may not be aware" is probably intended as a statement that global warming is a natural phenomenon, though he does not come out and say so. And he comments in passing that captive breeding in zoos may be a more efficient way of preserving species than actually trying to save their natural environments.
We should become "gardeners of the Earth" and have three basic motivations to do so: aesthetics, public health and new knowledge. Gingrich's failure to mention the almighty dollar as a reason to protect the environment speaks volumes; nowhere else in the book is he shy about money as a motivation; for example, his chapter on the Internet is about markets, markets, markets, but never free speech. Gingrich fails to explain why companies, left to their own devices, will see much value in aesthetics or public health, or even in new knowledge (unless it soon produces money).
On the aesthetics score he mentions how much he enjoys the Chattahoochee River; as for health, he mentions the improvement in air quality in New York and L.A. But he nowhere mentions that these environmental victories are due not to businesses, but to the Clean Water and Clean Air acts of the 1970's--legislation that the contract Republicans are doing all they can to strip. Ludicrously, in fact, he implies that the credit for a clean environment goes to American business: The former Soviet empire "is also vivid proof that government-controlled economies are much worse for the environment than free-market ones." Then, on the new knowledge point, he gives the show away: "To get the best ecosystem for our buck, we should use decentralized and entrepreneurial strategies rather than command-and-control bureaucratic efforts." But what is the incentive? Why will entrepreneurs ever protect the environment?
To answer this last question, Mr. Gingrich reaches deep into his sack and, as he so often does, produces a little rubber mouse of an idea: he tells the story of a constituent of his who makes a living recycling bottles into t-shirts. "Linda has a good chance of doing well financially by doing good environmentally. This is how a healthy free market in a free country ought to work." That "good chance" is a nice touch; he cannot even say she is doing well. By now, Mr. Gingrich has in fact answered my question, but very dishonestly: There is no tragedy of the commons. Somehow, the townspeople, without the intervention of government, will find it financially advantageous not to add that last animal.
In classic fashion, having proclaimed his love of the environment, Mr. Gingrich sprinkles his chapter with proclamations that nothing works. Superfund regulations cost too much money for the effect they produce. The money we spend to save one species could have been spent to save thirty instead. "[T]he asbestos program probably wasted $5 billion without significantly improving public health." (Anyone else here old enough to remember workers with their lungs totally destroyed by asbestos?) Gingrich's tactic is not unique to this chapter of the book; his essay on gun control similarly spends a lot more time telling us why no effort made by Democrats has been effective than it does telling us why we ought to have guns everywhere.
Here is the coup de grace: "After I was elected to Congress, I found that national environmental organizations were all too often simply an extension of the left wing of the Democratic Party." This is the ultimate rhetorical trick: Mr. Gingrich is an environmentalist, and the environmentalists are Communists, so only Mr. Gingrich is a true environmentalist.

Mr. Gingrich is arguing what lawyers call the "kettle case". Sued for breaking a kettle he had borrowed, a man defended himself as follows: 1. I never borrowed the kettle. 2. The kettle was never broken. 3. It was already broken when I borrowed it. Mr. Gingrich says that business is an excellent steward of the environment (never borrowed the kettle); the environment is fine (never broken); and that nothing can be done to address environmental problems anyway (already broken when borrowed). The most charitable thing I can say about the Speaker is that, had he lived in the 4th century BC, he would have been a passing rhetorician, but no Socrates.

Coincidentally, today's New York Times carried a description of the end result of a tragedy of the commons allowed to play itself out over the decades. The Pacific island of Nauru was rich in guano, and its residents authorized it to be strip mined, with no thought for their future. "Inch for inch, Nauru is the most environmentally ravaged nation on earth. So much of the island has been devoured by strip-mining begun 90 years ago that Nauruans face the prospect that they may have to abandon their bleak, depleted home. If it comes to that, they are expecting the outside world...to help them find a new island." ("A Pacific Island is Stripped of Everything", NYT December 10, p. A3.) They have millions of dollars stashed away, no place to live, are racked with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity due to an unhealthy diet of imported, canned foods, and have a life expectancy of less than 60 years. They are the Yorick's skull to our Hamlet (perhaps Mr. Gingrich is Polonius). And there are no new islands out there.