“The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality”: Garrett Hardin - Thinking without Limits about Living within Limits

Excerpted by Nicholas Stix

Garrett Hardin - Thinking without limits about living within limits
By Leon Kolankiewicz
Volume 29, Number 3 (Spring 2019)
Issue theme: "Living Within Limits - The Enduring Relevance of Garrett Hardin"
The Social Contract

Keywords: garrett hardin, tragedy, commons, environment, population


What sort of world do we want — a world with the maximum number of human beings, but no canaries? I’d rather have a world with fewer people, but in which canaries are a part of the world.
—Garrett Hardin, in a 1997 interview with environmental scientist Craig Straub for The Social Contract (see this issue, pages 24-33) at his home in Santa Barbara, California.

Half a century ago, the multidisciplinary scientific journal Science published a seminal essay about overpopulation whose reverberations are still felt to this day. Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is rivaled internationally in prestige among peer-reviewed general science journals only by the even more venerable Nature, published in the U.K.

The canonical essay was “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin, an erudite, disabled professor of human ecology at the lovely seaside Santa Barbara campus of the University of California (UCSB). For an essay whose abstract was so short, “Tragedy…” has had a very long reach. The abstract consisted of but a single sentence: “The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.”…

[Read the whole thing here.]