The Amazon River & the Tragedy of “The Tragedy of The Commons”

Environmentality: a militarized mentality... a pattern of thought that seeks to justify increases in national and civilian security by increasing insecurity; environmentalism turned into a policing action—Robert P. Marzec

According to Robert Marzec, of the University of Minnesota, science has sought since the 1700s to emancipate human beings from their dependence on chance; the science and philosophy of men ultimately “brought about a form of securitization that changed the understanding of Nature from an entity on which one depended into an entity that posed a threat.”

The “natural world” became a primal chaos of danger and uncertainty from which civilized humanity must free itself. According to the philosophical and scientific men of the Enlightenment—Locke, Smith, Hobbes, Bacon, Descartes, and others—the environment had to be subdued—securitized—for humans to obtain their independence...humans had to emancipate themselves from their (unenclosed) environments. Environment (like womankind) became “the other”, whose vagaries needed to be subdued and cultivated.

Fast forward to December 1968 when Garrett Hardin published his paper in Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Neoliberal capitalists, right wing theorists, and new-colonial development agencies, embraced the term to justify their privatization model based on productivity and growth. This iconic paper “framed the debate about common property for the last 30 years, and has exerted a baleful influence upon international development and environmental policy, even after Hardin himself admitted that he had got it wrong, and rephrased his entire theory,” writes the Land Magazine.

The Commons & The Myth of Tragedy

Hardin initially argued that “the commons were a less-advanced form of social existence, one that existed without rules or regulations,” writes Robert Marzec in his book Militarizing the Environment. Hardin supposed that “humans were fundamentally self-interested and at war with one another, [and] this unregulated social space of existence would result in over exploitation and ultimate destruction of natural resources.”

Hardin vigorously applied this singular perspective to all kinds of “property” from fish populations to national parks and polluted steams to parking lots and he prescribed a singular solution: assigning private property or enclosure.

Alan Bates in "Far from the Madding Crowd"

“The shortcoming of the tragic myth of the commons,” writes The Land Magazine, “is its strangely unidimensional picture of human nature. The farmers in Hardin’s pasture do not seem to talk to one another. As individuals, they are alienated, rational, utilitarian-maximizing automatons and little else, the sum total of their social life is the grim Hobbesian struggle of each against all, and all together against the pasture in which they are trapped.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is the opposite.

Hardin’s single-minded argument erroneously imposed the behaviour of a post-commons humanity—entrepreneurs trained in a capitalist enclosure model—on inhabitants who operated by other social paradigms in the commons. What Hardin overlooked, said E.P. Thompson, “is that commoners were not without common sense.” Hardin later retracted his use of this designation on commons humanity.

Inhabitancy vs. Entrepreneurship

The commons had developed a highly regulated social system of checks and balances against monopolization. Villages used functional mechanisms of seasonal distribution and redistribution, such as the “mead stick” system, to ensure that no single person would gain monopoly of the land. Each mead stick associated with a particular farmer was placed into a sac and drawn to determine which “mead-ow” a farmer got. Only the land considered suitable for crops was cultivated; the remainder was open for all to use for cattle.  Individuals who had access to the land were not entrepreneurs, bent on accumulating capital; they were inhabitants of the land and used it for sustenance rather than investment. The focus was on subsistence, not growth and production. The enclosure mentality, and its partner environmentality, arose like a warring specter over the human virtues of cooperation, compassion, fairness, and kindness.

When did we change? When—and why—did we get greedy for power?

The Tragedy of The Enclosures

According to Marzec, enclosures began “before the development of capitalism during the transformation from the Saxon system of tenure to the more militarized manorial system.” Enclosures really took hold in the feudal times, as tenure faded in favour of “manorial lords who desired the legal right to enclose for the purpose of increasing their wealth and, by extension, the ability to direct resources toward their defensive capacity.”

Marzec defines the enclosure movement by three actions: the eradication of inhabitancy, development of common law and a mandate to “improve land”.

History demonstrates that it is “enclosures—the dominant paradigm of modernity—that contribute to the exploitation of resources and the over-population of the planet,” writes Marzec. “The very idea of a cash crop—an environmental ‘improvement’ that compromises biodiversity in favour of anthropological gain— depends on the logic of enclosure.” Within the enclosure paradigm the entrepreneur is the essential human half of a machine that transforms a valueless chaotic ecosystem into a “surplus” of power and production. When did we lose our connection to Nature? When did it become just resource to be cultivated and improved?

European Enlightenment thinkers and political theorists of the 1600s and 1700s created the architecture of neoliberalism. Writing during the time of enclosing transformations, they all developed notions of human nature as warring, selfish and only interested in personal gain that organized its struggle and freedom around the cultivation/subjugation of the earth.

By the late 1700s, landscape began to be perceived through its utility. Even beauty was perceived according to whether a landscape was cultivated and ordered or wild and chaotic. Louis the Fourteenth’s Versailles gardens was totally based on the premise of order and the suppression of Nature’s chaos to the will of ‘man’. “Enclosed spaces were characterized as remarkable, beautiful, and pleasant, full of grace and gaiety. Open areas were labelled as promiscuous, and inhabitants of open areas as wild, and in as rough a state as the country they dwell in. Ecosystems came to be identified as useful or bare,” writes Marzec. I recently ran across this viewpoint in a 2016 article by Huffington Post in which Canada was described as mostly “empty”—as in empty of enclosed communities of people. The fact that these areas are rich with boreal forest, all kinds of life and many commons communities of indigenous people was totally disregarded by using the term “empty”.

The Age of Enclosure

According to Marzec, the true age of enclosure is the twenty-first century. He describes as example the long history of destructive development and environmental degradation in northern Brazil, where over four hundred years of colonial rule and development have naturally evolved into the neocolonial age of environmentality. Northern Brazil is the location of Camacari (owned by Brasken), the Western hemisphere’s largest petrochemical complex, with fifty thousand employees who work with chemicals, “such as benzene and alcohols, that affect the Amazon’s central and peripheral nervous system. Workers operate with little awareness of these chemicals’ toxicity,” writes Marzec. Camacari provides chemicals to Dow and Innova and in 2010 they acquired Sunoco.

Enclosing the Amazon

The Amazon River carries more than a fifth of all the freshwater that flows into the sea of the entire planet. This is five times more than it’s nearest competitor, the Congo, and twenty times more than the Mississippi River. Outside of the glaciated polar regions, half to two-thirds of the fresh water on the Earth is present in the Amazon, Marzec tells us. “This vast amount of water is increasingly polluted with arsenic, mercury and other highly toxic substances from mining and smelting,” writes Marzec. Only forty years ago, Amazon water was drinkable; now, with mining, industry and sewage from its millions of inhabitants, Amazon waters must be purified through some means.

Sadly, those in power have embraced Hardin’s tragic commons theory to steer towards enclosure as a means to save the forests (and the water). Researchers have estimated that within five years, an area the size of Virginia will have been handed over to private corporations and entrepreneurs to manage at their discretion. Along with those developers, the United States increasingly strengthens its military presence in Brazil, ensuring access by its corporations to Brazil’s energy reserves and putting pressure on ecosystems and associated indigenous populations that inhabit those territories. Invariably, writes Marzec, “indigenous territories are subsumed into programs of energy exploitation.”

We know where this will lead. And that is the real tragedy.


Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.

Exposing the Bully: Cliven Bundy and the Tragedy of the Commons

In the classic western 1953 movie Shane, a drifter finds himself in the midst of an ongoing conflict between the farming homesteaders and a cattle baron, wishing to seize their land. In the film Once Upon a Time in the West, the cattle baron is replaced by the railroad baron. Same deal. Same story… It hasn’t changed that much in a hundred years…

The premise of cattle/land/railroad baron vs farmer/homesteader or small independent rancher is a popular one for good storytelling about the pioneers of the western frontier, and is based firmly on historical fact. The 19^th century American analogues of the Monsanto and Nestle cartels and monopolies were decidedly held by these barons, many coming from oversees. Since the herds grazed on the open range and as few as a dozen cowboys could handle several thousand heads of cattle, a rancher's operating expenses were low. Many ranchers managed cattle and land for outside corporate interests. Two of the largest corporate ranches — the Anglo‐American Cattle Company (1879) and the Prairie Cattle Company (1881) — were established in England and Scotland, respectively.

In the Feb 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Ketcham writes that in 1885 the General Land Office reported to Congress on the worst form of monopoly in the western USA: “Cattle barons had enclosed the west forage along with scarce supplies of water in an arid landscape. They falsified titles using the signatures of cowhands and family members, employed fictitious identities to stake claims, and faked improvements on the land to appear to comply with the law.” Most private rangeland in the western states was likely obtained by various degrees of fraud, wrote Ketcham, quoting a historian in the industry. In the Johnson County War of 1892, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired gunmen to get rid of small operators accused of stealing cattle.

These barons weren’t cowboys, writes Ketcham; although “they came to veil themselves in the

cowboy mythos.” They were bankers or lawyers; they were mining, timber or railroad tycoons, whose soul interest was in making lots of money. “They dominated territorial legislatures, made governors, kept judges, juries and lawmen in their pockets. They hired gunmen to terrorize those who dared to encroach on their interests. They drove off small, cash-poor family ranchers by stampeding or rustling their herds, bankrupting them with spurious lawsuits, diverting water courses and sprints, fencing off land to monopolize the grass.”

“By the late nineteenth century, the barons had privatized the most productive grasslands and the riparian corridors, where the soil was especially rich. What remained was the less valuable dry-land forage of the public domain, which by 1918 totaled some 200 million acres spread across the eleven states of the West, and which the barons also dominated by stocking them with huge numbers of cows.”

Overgrazed and under-regulated, the public rangelands spiraled into degradation; the grass diminished, topsoil eroded by rain or stolen by the wind.

In 1934, Ferdinand Silcox, the chief forester of the US Forest Service, testified that unregulated grazing was “a cancer-like growth,” fated to become “a great interior desert.” That same year the Taylor Grazing Act was legislated to establish fees and a quota for grazing of government public lands. Stockmen petitioned to have the federally controlled land turned over to the state jurisdiction. The underlying agenda was “to discredit all conservation bureaus of the government, [and] to discredit conservation itself,” said historian Bernard DeVoto.

“The wholesale transfer of public lands to state control may never be achieved,” writes Ketcham. “But the goal might be more subtle: to attack the value of public lands, to reduce their worth in the public eye, to diminish and defund the institutions that protect the land, and to neuter enforcement.” Ketcham reiterates DeVoto’s observation in the 1940s that “no rancher in his right mind wanted to own the public lands himself. That would entail responsibility and stewardship. Worse, it would mean paying property taxes. What ranchers have always wanted, and what extractive industries in general want, is private exploitation with costs paid by the public.”

This is the moniker of the bully. Of small-minded, empty-hearted men, driven by the emptiness of greed and with no sense of connection to their world or environment. It is, in fact, the very reason we need government regulation.

Cliven Bundy

What does a modern-day cattle baron look like? He looks like Cliven Bundy, notorious scoff-law cattle rancher from Bunkerville, Nevada.

The rancher fancies himself a rebel hero in the form of Robin Hood, fighting for his rights against a “tyrannical” government; nothing could be further from the truth (read Ketcham’s in-depth article in the February issue of Harper’s). Firstly, the definition of a hero does not include a self-serving mean-spirited 20-year war on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over the destructive grazing by his cattle in the Gold Butte area—which has now taken on a terrorist quality. There’s nothing heroic about his disrespect for the land, the watershed and for people outside his own coterie. There is nothing heroic about wrongly citing the U.S. Constitution to support purposefully over-stocking and destroying sensitive habitat in the Butte. There is nothing heroic about refusing to pay a grazing fee for cattle that he will sell later for profit; a move that mimics what super-bully Nestlé is doing in watersheds around the world to sell water at great profit.

Bundy and his like-minded coterie rallied against the conservationist bureau with pretentions of American rights. They did this by intimidating and terrorizing foresters and ecologists at gun-point, and carelessly destroying the land with vehicles and cattle.

Rancher / Feds face-off near Bunkerville Nevada

What Bundy refuses to admit or care apparently is that grazing is now considered the chief cause of desertification in North America. Cattle are implicated in the eradication of native plants, which help balance the plains ecosystems. Studies in the area where Bundy’s cattle graze showed that the riparian areas were in the worst condition in history. Springs and streams were polluted, and cover for birds and mammals denuded. Invasive species had created monocultures of an inferior “industrialized landscape”. The sagebrush was replaced by a monoculture of cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). “Cheat is the cattleman’s most subtly destructive legacy,” wrote Ketcham. “The BLM itself has admitted that because of the cheat infestation ‘a large part of the Great Basin lies on the brink of ecological collapse’.” Not that Bundy understands what this means or even cares.

Bundy is plainly a bully and a thief, posing as a man of justice and knowledge.  His actions and words demonstrate that he knows nothing of these tenets.

Bundy is just a Nestlé-wannabe, who needs a mother’s discipline for his deep lack of respect and bad manners. Unfortunately, Mother Nature’s discipline will come in the form of environmental calamity inflicted on many more than Bundy himself.

This is the true tragedy of the bully.

Shame on you, Cliven Bundy.

Tragedy of the Commons:

The Tragedy of the Commons is an economic theory posited by Garrett Hardin in a 1968 article in Science. In the article he suggested that individuals will act out of self-interest, contrary to the best interests of the whole group, by depleting some common resource. The term was first used in an essay by Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd on the effects of unregulated grazing on common land.

Drawing on insights from Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Populations, written in 1798, Hardin warned that the exponential growth of the human population would soon overwhelm the world’s finite natural resources. Harden demonstrated his point with a parable of an open commons with a flock of grazing animals.

Hardin argued that individuals motivated by self-interest to maximize their wealth, will continue to add to their flocks to increase their personal wealth. Every animal added to the commons contributes to the degradation of the resources. However, the increasing use and ultimate degradation of the commons are small burdens to the individual user, relative to the gain in wealth accrued to that individual.

In Hardin’s parable, all individuals will naturally follow the same pattern until the resource is inevitably destroyed. “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons”. Hardin concludes stating “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all”. According to Hardin, the only way to avert the tragedy of the commons is through government regulation or exclusive, private ownership of resources.

In 1833 the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet that included an example of herders sharing a common parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In English villages, shepherds had sometimes grazed their sheep in common areas, and sheep ate grass more severely than cows. He suggested that overgrazing could result because for each additional sheep, a herder could receive benefits, while the group shared damage to the commons. If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visitwww.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.