Garrett Hardin: The Alternatives Facing Mankind

 

Underfoot erosion trickles,

Seeds dropped

     by wayward fathers - abstract

numbers pushing

     at finite shores.

 

         Garrett Hardin and his wife Jane died together on Sunday, September 14, 2003. Their simultaneous deaths were no coincidence; the couple had belonged to the Hemlock Society, recently renamed the "End-of-Life Choices Society," which instructs its members in painless ways to commit suicide. Garrett and Jane had been in poor health and had told family members that they intended to choose the time and means of their deaths. They didn't want bodily and mental deterioration to reduce them to incoherent social burdens. And so, on a quiet autumn Sunday, they took their lives in the dignified comfortable surroundings of their Santa Barbara home.

         Garrett Hardin taught human ecology at the University of California in Santa Barbara for over three decades. A prolific writer, he published numerous works, most dealing with various aspects of human social ecology and behavior. He had studied zoology at the University of Chicago in the early 1930's where the renowned ecologist, W.C. Allee, had imbued him with serious concerns about overpopulation. Allee, in turn, had been instructed by the works of W.F. Lloyd (1794-1852) who may have first sketched the essentiality of an "invisible hand in population control." It seems that the need for human birth control had already been recognized for well over a century before Hardin came to appreciate the value system Professor Allee passed on to him.

         Following completion of his Ph.D. thesis work in 1941 in the discipline of Microbial Ecology, Hardin conducted research at Stanford University's Carnegie Plant Biology Institute. There he developed novel types of food from algae. However he eventually decided to abandon these efforts because of his conviction that creating new large-scale food sources would ultimately only worsen the human overpopulation predicament. A pragmatic idealist, Hardin did not want to devote his life's work to a project that would ultimately have adverse consequences on mankind.

         Hardin firmly believed that overpopulation was the number one threat to humanity, and this conviction caused him to enter the political arena. A staunch, conservative Republican, he lectured across the country arguing for legalized abortion. He argued not only from sociological standpoints, but also from personal standpoints: he felt there was a need to free women from "compulsory pregnancy." He joined an underground network of socially conscious individuals who helped women in the States, where abortion was illegal, to get abortions in Mexico, Japan, and Sweden. When engaged in conversations with fellow conservatives, he justified his actions by pointing out the price tag for raising an unwanted child. The cost both to the parent(s) and to society, he claimed, far exceeded the cost of the abortion.

         Hardin's most acclaimed essay was entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons." It was originally published in 1968 in Science magazine, but it subsequently appeared in over a hundred anthologies. In this essay, Hardin argued that humanity must curtail one of its basic freedoms, namely reproductive freedom, in order to stave off overpopulation and environmental disaster. "The Commons" poses fundamental questions that we are still pondering today. How should society allocate resources such as land, water, and air? How can society preserve our wild life, forests, and oceans? These resources, Hardin felt, ought to belong to everyone and should not be squandered for the profitable benefit of just a few. But, he said, NO ONE would reap benefit if the population were too large.

         Hardin offered a fundamental metaphor to argue his point of view: he focused on the natural tendency of cattlemen to graze as many cows as possible in a common pasture, thus maximizing immediate personal gain. But overgrazing could cause the lush pasture to become a barren wasteland. "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" he argued. The only rational solution would be mutually agreed upon coercion to limit destruction of the commons.

Hardin felt that the principle of the commons applied most emphatically to human reproduction. "The freedom to breed will bring eventual ruin to all." The coercion he referred to could take the form of China's one-child law, or it could more gently be implemented in a democratic society by imposing steeply increased tax penalties for the second, third, and fourth children in a family. Either solution, Hardin thought, could guarantee sustainability and the continuation of a healthy human society.

         To be sure, Hardin's essay elicited strong criticism, particularly from members of the religious right wing of American society who felt that reproduction is one of our "God-given rights." But for many, it was Hardin's witty, sensible and impassionate logic that led to the realization that our population could not continue to expand while consuming our resource base. Thirty-five years later, we recognize the validity of Hardin's arguments. But today, we are much further along the road toward the dire consequences that Hardin feared.

         As noted above, Hardin was above all a pragmatic conservative. He knew that if we did not limit human birth, resource limitation would lead to conflict and societal collapse. He illustrated this point in a metaphorical article entitled "Lifeboat Ethics" (1974). He argued that people in a lifeboat could not let everyone in (if the number of swimmers was large), for if they did, the boat could not stay afloat and everyone would die. Thus, "complete justice leads to complete catastrophe."

         The "life boat" represented to Hardin a rich nation such as the U.S., and the swimmers represented the poorer nations. He noted that if wealthy nations were to follow their Christian ideals, being their brother's keepers, they must share their wealth equally. But then, he wrote, in the absence of international birth control, "the boat is swamped and everyone drowns." This argument provided his rationalization for a selfishly conservative political stance that denied Christian morality and proposed restricting immigration while limiting foreign aid.

         Reflecting on "Lifeboat Ethics" and putting its message into the perspective of "The Commons," we are faced with a dilemma only if we refuse to relinquish our reproductive rights. If the world can accept "voluntary coercion" on this one issue, then and only then can we preserve our other freedoms. In the absence of population control, fighting for dwindling resources will become rampant, and satisfaction of our basic biological needs will dominate our behavior. Humanitarianism will go by the wayside.

         One essential extension of Hardin's arguments is the probability that in the long run, everyone, even the rich, will suffer: salvation will not be available to anyone. In the absence of birth control, society will collapse, and Darwinian "Survival of the Fittest" will reign. The ancient histories of defunct civilizations such as those of Easter Island, the Anasazis, and the Middle East will be repeated on a global scale. And Hardin saw it coming: "The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed. ‘Freedom is recognition of necessity‚' (Hegel), and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed."

 

 

Readings

Elaine Woo (LA Times), Saturday, September 20, 2003, pg. B15.

Garrett Hardin (1968). "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162, 1243-1248. http://dieoff.com/page95.htm.

Garrett Hardin (1974). "Lifeboat Ethics: The case against helping the poor." (http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html).

Garrett Hardin (1977). "Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity" http://dieoff.org/page96.htm.