The End of Abundance

Abstract

Environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s believed that they had lived to see Thomas Malthus’s principle of population (that population outpaces food supplies) become reality. They said that the world’s resources, including its fresh water, arable land, oil reserves, forests, and open spaces, groaned under the stress of unprecedented human numbers and economic growth. In the years before Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the essay from which this excerpt is taken, humans left the earth’s atmosphere for the first time, and they photographed a lonely blue planet (see page 3). The photograph offered a new image of terrestrial fragility and a new metaphor: Spaceship Earth. Hardin added another element: Competition to accumulate wealth results in resource depletion, because no one has a logical motive not to consume. The essay is a statement of environmental doom, driven by the same human nature that Malthus so feared. A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number” be realized?1