Conversation

I wish people would stop describing the environmental crisis as a "tragedy of the commons". Even Hardin's original model, which has been debunked and disproven, postulated a resource badly shared among near equals. What we are experiencing is comparable to the deliberate desolation of a forest by strip miners with vast machines. To adjust the metaphor, the multinational oil, agrochemical, and weapons companies and the billionaires that own them are not selfish villagers across the green, they are invading armies with weapons. Not pathetic tragedy based on a flaw in human nature, just deliberate desolation and extirpation.