In reality, while this logic has led to many commons resources becoming overharvested and destroyed, others have been preserved in the face of harvesting for hundreds or even thousands of years. Unhappy outcomes include the overexploitation and collapse of most major marine fisheries, and the extermination of much of the megafauna (large mammals, birds, and reptiles) on every oceanic island or continent settled by humans for the first time within the last 50,000 years. Happy outcomes include the maintenance of many local fisheries, forests, and water sources, such as the Montana trout fisheries and irrigation systems that I described in Chapter 1. Behind these happy outcomes lie three alternative arrangements that have evolved to preserve a commons resource while still permitting a sustainable harvest.
One obvious solution is for the government or some other outside force to step in, with or without the invitation of the consumers, and to enforce quotas, as the shogun and daimyo in Tokugawa Japan, Inca emperors in the Andes, and princes and wealthy landowners in 16th-century Germany did for logging. However, that is impractical in some situations (e.g., the open ocean) and involves excessive administrative and policing costs in other situations. A second solution is to privatize the resource, i.e., to divide it into individually owned tracts that each owner will be motivated to manage prudently in his/her own interests. That practice was applied to some village-owned forests in Tokugawa Japan. Again, though, some resources (such as migratory animals and fish) are impossible to subdivide, and the individual owners may find it even harder than a government’s coast guard or police to exclude intruders.
The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogeneous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined. A good example is the case, discussed in Chapter 1, of Montana water rights for irrigation. While the allocation of those rights has been written into law, nowadays the ranchers mostly obey the water commissioner whom they themselves elect, and they no longer take their disputes to court for resolution. Other such examples of homogeneous groups prudently managing resources that they expect to pass to their children are the Tikopia Islanders, New Guinea highlanders, members of Indian castes, and other groups discussed in Chapter 9. Those small groups, along with the Icelanders (Chapter 6) and the Tokugawa Japanese constituting larger groups, were further motivated to reach agreement by their effective isolation: it was obvious to the whole group that they would have to survive just on their resources for the foreseeable future. Such groups knew that they could not make the frequently heard “ISEP” excuse that is a recipe for mismanagement: “It’s not my problem, it’s someone else’s problem.”
Clashes of interest involving rational behavior are also prone to arise when the principal consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource but society as a whole does. For example, much commercial harvesting of tropical rainforests today is carried out by international logging companies, which typically take out short-term leases on land in one country, cut down the rainforest on all their leased land in that country, and then move on to the next country. The loggers have correctly perceived that, once they have paid for their lease, their interests are best served by cutting its forest as quickly as possible, reneging on any agreements to replant, and leaving. In that way, loggers destroyed most of the lowland forests of the Malay Peninsula, then of Borneo, then of the Solomon Islands and Sumatra, now of the Philippines, and coming up soon of New Guinea, the Amazon, and the Congo Basin. What is thus good for the loggers is bad for the local people, who lose their source of forest products and suffer consequences of soil erosion and stream sedimentation. It’s also bad for the host country as a whole, which loses some of its biodiversity and its foundations for sustainable forestry. The outcome of this clash of interests involving short-term leased land contrasts with a frequent outcome when the logging company owns the land, anticipates repeated harvests, and may find a long-term perspective to be in its interests (as well as in the interests of local people and the country). Chinese peasants in the 1920s recognized a similar contrast when they compared the disadvantages of being exploited by two types of warlords. It was hard to be exploited by a “stationary bandit,” i.e. a locally entrenched warlord, who would at least leave peasants with enough resources to generate more plunder for that warlord in future years. Worse was to be exploited by a “roving bandit,” a warlord who like a logging company with short-term leases would leave nothing for a region’s peasants and just move on to plunder another region’s peasants.
A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else. Such clashes, flagrantly personified by the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the governing elite in Haiti, are becoming increasingly frequent in the modern U.S., where rich people tend to live within their gated compounds (Plate 36) and to drink bottled water. For example, Enron’s executives correctly calculated that they could gain huge sums of money for themselves by looting the company coffers and thereby harming all the stockholders, and that they were likely to get away with their gamble.
Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kings, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of societal collapses, including those of the Maya kings, Greenland Norse chiefs, and modern Rwandan politicians discussed in this book. Barbara Tuchman devoted her book The March of Folly to famous historical examples of disastrous decisions, ranging from the Trojans bringing the Trojan horse within their walls, and the Renaissance popes provoking the Protestant succession, to the German decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I (thereby triggering America’s declaration of war), and Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack that similarly triggered America’s declaration of war in 1941. As Tuchman put it succinctly, “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.’ ” As a result of lust for power, Ester Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on their putting up bigger statues and monuments than their rivals. They were trapped in a competitive spiral, such that any chief or king who put up smaller statues or monuments to spare the forests would have been scorned and lost his job. That’s a regular problem with competitions for prestige, which are judged on a short time frame.
Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. We shall see in the final chapter that the high environmental awareness of the Dutch (including their politicians) goes back to the fact that much of the population—both the politicians and the masses—lives on land lying below sea level, where only dikes stand between them and drowning, so that foolish land planning by politicians would be at their own personal peril. Similarly, New Guinea highlands big-men live in the same type of huts as everyone else, scrounge for firewood and timber in the same places as everyone else, and were thereby highly motivated to solve their society’s need for sustainable forestry (Chapter 9).
All of these examples in the preceding several pages illustrate situations in which a society fails to try to solve perceived problems because the maintenance of the problem is good for some people. In contrast to that so-called rational behavior, other failures to attempt to solve perc
eived problems involve what social scientists consider “irrational behavior”: i.e., behavior that is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by clashes of values: we may ignore a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling. “Persistence in error,” “wooden-headedness, “refusal to draw inference from negative signs,” and “mental standstill or stagnation” are among the phrases that Barbara Tuchman applies to this common human trait. Psychologists use the term “sunk-cost effect” for a related trait: we feel reluctant to abandon a policy (or to sell a stock) in which we have already invested heavily.
Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous behavior. For example, much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation: to obtain logs to transport and erect the giant stone statues that were the object of veneration. At the same time, but 9,000 miles away and in the opposite hemisphere, the Greenland Norse were pursuing their own religious values as Christians. Those values, their European identity, their conservative lifestyle in a harsh environment where most innovations would in fact fail, and their tightly communal and mutually supportive society allowed them to survive for centuries. But those admirable (and, for a long time, successful) traits also prevented them from making the drastic lifestyle changes and selective adoptions of Inuit technology that might have helped them survive for longer.
The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense. Australians brought from Britain a tradition of raising sheep for wool, high land values, and an identification with Britain, and thereby accomplished the feat of building a First World democracy remote from any other (except New Zealand), but are now beginning to appreciate that those values also have downsides. In modern times a reason why Montanans have been so reluctant to solve their problems caused by mining, logging, and ranching is that those three industries used to be the pillars of the Montana economy, and that they became bound up with Montana’s pioneer spirit and identity. Montanans’ pioneer commitment to individual freedom and self-sufficiency has similarly made them reluctant to accept their new need for government planning and for curbing individual rights. Communist China’s determination not to repeat the errors of capitalism led it to scorn environmental concerns as just one more capitalist error, and thereby to saddle China with enormous environmental problems. Rwandans’ ideal of large families was appropriate in traditional times of high childhood mortality, but has led to a disastrous population explosion today. It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined: “the maintenance intact by rulers and policy-makers of the ideas they started with,” to quote Barbara Tuchman once again.
It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live? Millions of people in modern times have indeed faced the decision whether, to save their own life, they would be willing to betray friends or relatives, acquiesce in a vile dictatorship, live as virtual slaves, or flee their country. Nations and societies sometimes have to make similar decisions collectively.
All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can’t be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning them will ensure survival. In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit; they lost that gamble. Among five small Eastern European countries faced with the overwhelming might of Russian armies, the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians surrendered their independence in 1939 without a fight, the Finns fought in 1939-1940 and preserved their independence, and Hungarians fought in 1956 and lost their independence. Who among us is to say which country was wiser, and who could have predicted in advance that only the Finns would win their gamble?
Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles. The world as a whole today faces similar decisions about its environmental problems that we shall consider in the final chapter.
Those are examples of how irrational behavior associated with clashes of values does or doesn’t prevent a society from trying to solve perceived problems. Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive and complain about the problem—such as Tasmania’s Green Party that first protested foxes’ introduction into Tasmania. The public may dismiss warnings because of previous warnings that proved to be false alarms, as illustrated by Aesop’s fable about the eventual fate of the shepherd boy who had repeatedly cried “Wolf!” and whose cries for help were then ignored when a wolf did appear. The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking ISEP (p. 430: “It’s someone else’s problem”).
Partly irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems often arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same individual. Rwandan and Haitian peasants, and billions of other people in the world today, are desperately poor and think only of food for the next day. Poor fishermen in tropical reef areas use dynamite and cyanide to kill coral reef fish (and incidentally to kill the reefs as well) in order to feed their children today, in the full knowledge that they are thereby destroying their future livelihood. Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focus: they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters and pay attention only to problems that are on the verge of explosion. For example, a friend of mine who is closely connected to the current federal administration in Washington, D.C., told me that, when he visited Washington for the first time after the 2000 national elections, he found that our government’s new leaders had what he termed a “90-day focus”: they talked only about those problems with the potential to cause a disaster within the next 90 days. Economists rationally attempt to justify these irrational focuses on short-term profits by “discounting” future profits. That is, they argue that it may be better to harvest a resource today than to leave some of the resource intact for harvesting tomorrow, on the grounds that the profits from today’s harvest could be invested, and that the investment interest thereby accumulated between now and some alternative future harvest time would tend to make today’s harvest more valuable than the future harvest. In that case, the bad consequences are born by the next generation, but that generation cannot vote or complain today.
Some other possible reasons for irrational refusal to try to solve a perceived problem are more speculative. One is a well-recognized phenomenon in short-term decision-making termed “crowd psychology.” Individuals who find themselves members of a large coherent group or crowd, especially one that is emotionally excited, may become swept along to support the group’s decision, even though the same individuals might have rejected the decision if allowed to reflect on it alone at leisure. As the German dramatist Schiller wrote, “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a
member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.” Historical examples of crowd psychology in operation include late medieval Europe’s enthusiasm for the Crusades, accelerating overinvestment in fancy tulips in Holland peaking between 1634 and 1636 (“Tulipomania”), periodic outbursts of witch-hunting like the Salem witch trials of 1692, and the crowds whipped up into frenzies by skillful Nazi propagandists in the 1930s.
A calmer small-scale analog of crowd psychology that may emerge in groups of decision-makers has been termed “groupthink” by Irving Janis. Especially when a small cohesive group (such as President Kennedy’s advisors during the Bay of Pigs crisis, or President Johnson’s advisors during the escalation of the Vietnam War) is trying to reach a decision under stressful circumstances, the stress and the need for mutual support and approval may lead to suppression of doubts and critical thinking, sharing of illusions, a premature consensus, and ultimately a disastrous decision. Both crowd psychology and groupthink may operate over periods of not just a few hours but also up to a few years: what remains uncertain is their contribution to disastrous decisions about environmental problems unfolding over the course of decades or centuries.
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