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World

Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa

5 March 2024

3:33 AM

5 March 2024

3:33 AM

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

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