Garrett Hardin Quotes
Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, 1968, p. 1245.
This was the first time that the Environmental Protection Agency had vetoed a permit for a mountain top removal coal mining project that had been granted by the Army Corps of Engineers. The proposed project, Spruce 1, would have removed the entire top of a mountain. It would have created a number of jobs, but it also would have polluted a number of streams in the area and would have affected the ground water of people in the area. What made this a most difficult political decision was that the economic damage was clear as was the science showing the water damage. The people in the community were split over which was the worse alternative.
The major reason for not yet harvesting waste is the labor, caital, and energy costs of recycling relative to the value of the resource is too high. Technology improvements and greater shortages continuously change the equation in favor of harvesting more and more resources.
In most of the world there has been a continual migration into cities.
Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist who warned of the dangers of human overpopulation. He is most known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons, in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science, which called attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable.":112 He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist, whose publications were "frank in their racism and quasi-fascist ethnonationalism".
