[August 10, 2016] As a young boy growing up in Northeast Louisiana, I hunted small game and fished freshwater streams all Summer with my best friends. One particular small wooded lot was our favorite to hunt for squirrels and I, with my .410 shotgun, was a regular. We couldn’t resist the large bounty of squirrels and regularly took home our legal limit.
The problem was that over a period of three years, the number of squirrels we took home was less and less. Some days we saw not a single squirrel. In the early 1960s we were baffled by what Professor Garrett Hardin would later call, The Tragedy of the Commons; he published an article and a book by the same name. Hardin proposed that a shared resource would be exploited and eventually depleted by individuals acting in their own self interest through their collective efforts.
There are many examples of commons that are known to have collapsed by overuse. One historical and most interesting example is the environmental collapse of Easter Island (see a good article by the Smithsonian, link here). This was an island in the Pacific Ocean that once flourished with its Polynesian inhabitants in an extraordinary vibrant society.
There are, of course, many examples in everyday life where the commons do not collapse but only when managed properly and expertly. Leaders would do well to understand the difficulty of maintaining what Hardin called the “commons” because they are everywhere from city parks to local water reservoirs to vast forests.
The dilemma that leaders must overcome is that people’s short-term interests can be at odds with the long-term interests of group and the common good. Considerable scientific research has concentrated on a number of motivational, strategy, and structural factors that might be conducive to management of commons.1
The U.S. military has a large amount of equipment that can be viewed as commons and solutions on how to prevent its overuse and misuse draws on much of this research. One way the U.S. military tackles this problem is by getting individuals service members to act as if they have personal ownership. If we look at U.S. Air Force aircraft, we can see the name of the pilot stenciled on its fuselage. In the U.S. Army we see the name of the driver on the windshield.
Eventually, all my friends and I moved on to hunting squirrels in other locations. Our dads had to drive us but we were able to find additional wooded lots with abundant squirrel populations. We had overhunted the old favorite lot. Later, I would suggest that we simply rotate areas to hunt in and we did. We had solved the problem of the tragedy of the commons. If only Hardin knew of our solution, he would have approved.
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