Environment: The Growing Tragedy of the Commons

..... In colonial days, the center of town, such as Market Green around the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg, or Boston Commons, was a shared space for grazing. .. It was common ground, and hence called "the Commons." .. Without controls, the colonials soon found, the commons became overgrazed. .. Limits had to be put in place. .. So began an essay by Garrett Hardin for Earth Day #1 (Science, 13 Dec 1968; 1243-48).

..... The whole of spaceship Earth is a commons which we all - humans, beasts, vegetation and microbes - share. ..How is Mother Earth doing? .. Let's go back to simpler times - maybe 50,000 years ago, when our ancestors lived in caves or other crude shelters. .. There weren't many of us Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis around then. .. While the men went out on always dangerous hunts to bring back much needed protein with lots of lysine in it, the women and children stayed nearer home gathering fruits, roots, maybe some fish, bugs and other victuals, and the women dangerously had babies (death by childbirth was one in four births!). ..This is not unlike how the Bushmen of southern Africa have it today. ..The Bushmen risk their lives bringing back perhaps 10% of the calories needed, and the Bushwomen and children more safely provided the other 90% of the calories mainly as starches. .. But, today, many Bushwomen give birth in clinics.

..... Things were simple 50,000 years ago. ..A clan often trekked from place to place generally making little overall impact on the local environment, let alone the world environment. .. Trampled vegetation and broken branches regrew. ..The seas remained untouched, and most of the land areas too extreme in climate were at best brief sojourns. ..Let us make the amount of environmental impact made on the world by each person then equal to 1 caveman equivalent (CEq). .. What with an estimated 10 million cavemen, there were a total of 10,000,000 CEq of environmental impact on the earth as a whole per year.

..... Now let us turn to a cluster of present-day peasant huts in India. .. Each peasant plows a small field causing erosion by water and wind. .. The manufacture of each plow blade required a hearth and coal or coke to heat the ore and make some smoke. ..Each cooking pot in the huts resulted in similar metalurgical impact on the environment. ..Each peasant made more impact on the earth's environment than did their caveman ancestor. .. Let's guesstimate perhaps ten-fold more impact. ..With a billion Indian peasants alive today, there should be 1 billion times 10 caveman equivalents of environmental impact or 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) CEq/yr. ..That means that today's peasants in just India alone contribute a thousand times the global environmental impact as did all the cavemen worldwide several millenia before.

..... But today's world is not populated solely by peasants. .. There are also, for example, the 200 million Americans with their cars, roads, houses, high tech playthings, and on and on. ..It has been estimated that the average American impacts the world's environment to the same degree as 10,000 peasants, or 100,000 cavemen. .. While the peasants recycle almost everything, the Americans rarely do - and so much is hidden cost - out of sight and out of mind. .. So, adding up the impact, America is worth 200 million times 100 thousand or 20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) CEq/yr. .. That means that while Americans number only a fifth as much as the number of peasants in India, they have 2,000 times the world wide impact!

..... Now to get to the real depths of the problem, consider that each American baby impacts the world as much as 10,000 peasant babies. .. It won't take very many more babies of the First World to totally overwhelm the world's resources. ..This is why it may be far more important to control the birth rates in advantaged countries than in disadvantaged ones.

The Atmospheric Commons

..... The above discussion of CEq's is a very general one in that it considers that everyone takes a bite out of all aspects of the environment in proportion to their CEq. ..But suppose that one segment of the world's population - even one of the more disadvantaged ones - practices a way of life that degrades one sector of the "commons" much more than other societies or cultures do? .. And what if that sector of the commons is small but nonetheless vital to all? Even a small population can cause disaster to all. .. In the past few years, Joel Levine of NASA's atmospherics unit has been allowed to release classified satellite photographs indicating where greenhouse gases originate. .. More than 90% come from the highly disadvantaged sections of the earth because of their practice of slash and burn agriculture. .. Thus it may be that the relatively few peasants of the world are destroying our atmosphere!

..... And why are they doing this? ..Because their super-rapidly growing populations require ever more and more land for their primative agricultural methods. .. Therefore, it appears that controlling the population growths of disadvantaged populations is also a necessity! .. Or perhaps a major effort toward educating those people in modern agriculture will help - for awhile, at least!

Just How Tenuous Is Life on Earth?

..... As far back as 1970 the American Chemical Society advised the chemical industry that their members should test all products and byproducts for their toxicity on the five different species of nitrogen-cycle bacteria. .. All life depends on just these five different species which work together as a conveyor belt - moving atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia and excess ammonia back to nitrogen oxides and then to atmospheric nitrogen again. ..All other life depends on the production of that ammonia. .. The only other natural source of ammonia is from lightning, and that amount is miniscule. .. All life also requires that excess ammonia from decaying proteins in vegetation, animals and dead microbes be converted back to atmospheric nitrogen otherwise the site will become so alkaline that nothing can live there. ..Thus the accidental discharge of a chemical that very unfortunately targets and kills even one species of these five species would end life as we know it - pushing the planet back to one inhabited only be a few bacteria.

..... Very recently, another unexpected environmental bombshell hit. .. Suddenly the fertility rates of humans and other animals began falling. Statisticians were at a complete loss as to the reason. .. And then malformed tadpoles and other animals started appearing. .. Finally the answer started to become apparent: .. too much of something mimicking estrogen was getting into the environment. .. It was much too low in concertration for chemists to detect it, but various forms of life became the tools of bioassay. ..It was then found that one of the byproducts of the manufacture of acrylic plastic - as in our drinking cups and styrofoam - was the culprit: .. it seems to have enough similarity to the docking site of estrogen, that many animals react to it as if it indeed were estrogen. .. In some forms of animals, females are "told" not to ovulate, and in males spermatogenesis is depressed. .. In other animals, estrogen is not a sex hormone, but rather a hormone for other functions such as development, and oddly shaped tadpoles come out, and turtles get several heads. .. And this is a pollutant even at extremely low concentrations.

For Whom Is This Lesson?

..... This is your world, and will be the world of your children. .. Various studies by the CIA done as predictors of social stability show that by the year 2050, sea level will have risen perhaps 20 feet due to global warming. .. Nearly 80% of the world's cities will be either flooded or dyked and susceptible to the next major storm. ..You yourselves are experiencing the first obvious signs of global warming. .. Things will get worse, and your children will suffer greatly. And their children? ..You and your children are at the environmental bottleneck. ..YOU have to do something!

..... Or maybe the roaches will inherit the earth!

We Must Lower Our CEq's!

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