The basis for this is a racist hoax called #TheTragedyOfTheCommons, by the eugenicist white supremacist #GarrettHardin, published by *Science* in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "#commons" - things owned and shared by a community - are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, which prompts nice people to *also* overrun the commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

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The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we've all experienced some version of it - the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by #GarrettHardin in *Science*, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

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@Kantolope
It seems like almost nobody who references Hardin has actually read The Tragedy of the Commons.
http://www.eeescience.utoledo.edu/Faculty/Mayer/reading/The%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons,%20by%20Garrett%20Hardin%20(1968).htm

His point was not that commons don't work, but that they need effective regulation to avoid the titular problem. These days, following Ostrom, we fold that regulation into what a commons *is*, but this definition wasn't in widespread use when Hardin wrote the essay in the 1960s.

#commons #GarrettHardin

@cuttlefish Having some familiarity with Hardin's work:

• His views don't fit neatly into any political camp, and party platforms themselves shifted markedly over his life. (I don't know what party he registered or voted with.)

• His views and causes earned criticism from both left and right. He was an ecologist, and favoured environmental conservation, immigration limits, abortion, and eugenics, while criticising creationism, a platform which crosses (and offends across) party lines.

• His own views progressed with time. There isn't any criticism based on nationalism of which I'm aware a least during the 1960s--1970s, and probablly not for some time later. His more strident views came later in life, largely in the 1990s and 2000s. I am less familiar with those.

• I'm not aware of significant contemporaneous criticism of him on racial grounds during his lifetime and particularly not through the 1960s--1980s. This includes hearing him in debate with Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet and arguably a post-scarcty advocate.

What Hardin fundamentally believed in was that the Earth has limits, and that neither population nor human consumption (or effluvia) can grow without bounds. This is a taking away of the candy bowl which is deeply unpopular on both the ideological right (believing in unlimited private wealth) and ideological left (believing in unlimited social wealth). It's also an understanding which forces very hard choices.

Hardin was noted for taking on taboo topics (he titled one of his books after this). Venturing into hard questions and difficult domains risks being wrong and offending.

SPLC's case against Hardin is, by their own standards, fairly weak and circumstantual, leaning very heavily on both innuendo and association with others whose own views largely chrystalised later. I respect SPLC but question their accuracy here. At least some of their argument is revisionist.

https://www.splcenter.org/20090131/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin

I don't dismiss concerns entirely, and there's much to be concerned and highly conscious of. But casting a moralising net over the entire question of limits and planetary boundaries is also highly problematic. As someone who's familiar with that discussion and its history over the past 200+ years, including Malthus, claims of race and class favouritism have long been raised against those who've pointed to the simple existence of limits.

#GarrettHardin #LimitstoGrowth #Racism