Page 184 - Environment: The Science Behind the Stories

market capitalism also provides businesses or individuals little The cooperative approach may work if the resource is
incentive to equalize costs and benefits among parties. Market localized and its use is easily enforced, but often these condi-
prices often do not reflect the value of environmental contri- tions do not hold. Privatization may work if property rights
butions to economies or the full costs imposed on the public can be clearly assigned (as with land), but it tends not to work
by private parties when their actions degrade the environment with resources such as air or water. Privatization also opens
(Chapter 6). Such market failure (p. 172) has traditionally the door to short-term profit-taking at the long-term expense
been viewed as justification for government intervention. of the resource. Thus, in many cases public oversight and reg-
In modern mixed economies (p. 159), governments typi- ulation by democratic government are likely the best ways to
cally intervene in the marketplace for several reasons: avoid the tragedy of the commons.

• To provide social services, such as national defense, med- Free riders A second reason we develop policy for pub-
ical care, and education
licly held resources is the free rider predicament. Let’s say a
• To provide “safety nets” (for the elderly, the poor, victims community on a river suffers from water pollution that ema-
of natural disasters, and so on) nates from ten different factories. The problem could in theory
• To eliminate unfair advantages held by single buyers or be solved if every factory voluntarily agreed to reduce its own
sellers pollution. However, once they all begin reducing their pollu-
• To manage publicly held resources tion, it becomes tempting for any one of them to stop doing
so. A factory that avoids the efforts others are making would
• To mitigate pollution and other threats to health and qual- in essence get a “free ride.” If enough factories take a free ride,
ity of life
the whole enterprise will collapse. Because of the free rider
Environmental policy aims to protect environmental qual- problem, private voluntary efforts are often less effective than
ity and the natural resources people use, and also to promote efforts mandated by public policy.
equity or fairness in people’s use of resources.
External costs Environmental policy also aims to pro-
The tragedy of the commons When publicly acces- mote fairness by dealing with external costs (p. 164), harmful
sible resources are open to unregulated exploitation, they tend impacts suffered by people not involved in the actions that
to become overused and, as a result, are damaged or depleted. created them. For example, a factory might reap greater profits
So argued environmental scientist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 by discharging waste into a river instead of paying for proper
essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Basing his argument on waste disposal or recycling. Its actions, however, impose
an age-old scenario, Hardin explained that in a public pasture external costs (water pollution, reduced fish populations, aes-
(or “common”) open to unregulated grazing, each person who thetic degradation, or other problems) on downstream users
grazes animals will be motivated by self-interest to increase of the river. Likewise, natural gas drilling operations that pol-
the number of his or her animals in the pasture. Because no lute groundwater or cause earthquakes may impose external
single person owns the pasture, no one has incentive to expend costs on people living nearby (Figure 7.3). Contamination of
effort taking care of it. Instead, each person takes what he or drinking water by methane from natural gas, or by the many
she can until the resource is depleted and overgrazing causes chemicals used in fracking fluids in the drilling process, can
the pasture’s food production to collapse. This is known as the disrupt people’s lives and affect their health (see THe SCieNCe
tragedy of the commons. BeHiND THe STOrY, pp. 184–185).
The tragedy of the commons pertains to many types of
resources held and used in common by the public: forests, fish- CHAPTER 7 • Envi R onm E n TA l Poli C y : mA king D EC i si ons A n D s olving P R obl E m s
eries, clean air, clean water—even the global climate. When
such resources are being depleted or degraded, it is in society’s
interest to develop guidelines for their use. In Hardin’s exam-
ple of a common pasture, guidelines might limit the number of
animals each person can graze or might require pasture users
to help restore and manage the shared resource. These two
concepts—restriction of use, and management—are central to
environmental policy today.
Public oversight through government is a standard way
to alleviate the tragedy of the commons, but this dilemma can
also be addressed in other ways. One is a bottom-up coopera-
tive approach, in which users of the resource band together and
cooperate to prevent overexploitation. Indeed, many traditional
societies over the centuries have developed ways to manage
resources cooperatively and sustainably at the community
level. Another approach is privatization, in which the resource
is subdivided and allotments are sold into private ownership, Figure 7.3 Pollution from shale gas drilling operations may
so that each owner has incentive to conserve his or her portion create external costs. Dimock resident Patricia Farnelli holds
of the resource in ways that maximize its productivity. polluted road runoff water from the fracking activity on her land. 183

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