Ecological Science and Practice: Dialogues Across Cultures and Disciplines - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 20

between the two groups has been hard to overcome and has not completely evaporated.
Anthropologist Michael Paolisso (Greer 2003 ) has worked with communities of
Chesapeake watermen and has tried to identify the core beliefs of both watermen
and scientists that are important for conservation practice. In this case the conserva-
tion problem centered on the Chesapeake blue crab, whose populations can fl uctuate
dramatically from year to year. Paolisso noted some similarities in core beliefs but
also striking differences between the two groups, most notably in the watermen's
belief that “God and nature” were the best “managers” of natural resources. While it
can seem nonsensical to a scientist to make such a statement, the watermen were
trying to express the idea that population fl uctuations of the blue crab were not
predictable, nor were they capable of being controlled by humans. In addition, the
watermen had a faith-based view of natural cycles which came from their daily
experiences on the water. To the watermen, the scientists' faith in their models was
perplexing. While the two sides maintained their points of difference, these dialogues
about core values and perceptions of nature nonetheless helped them to fi nd some
common ground. The kind of work Paolisso does to facilitate dialogues across the
cultures of science and watermen helps to build respect and trust on both sides.

2.2 Challenging the Tragedy of the Commons Logic

The importance not just of understanding other cultures, but of building respect and
trust between different communities, is emphasized in a growing literature that has
been challenging the tragedy of the commons logic since the 1980s. This critique
forms the basis for a powerful analysis and synthesis by social scientists such as the
late Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues and collaborators. Ostrom shared the Nobel
Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her analysis of economic governance, espe-
cially the governance of common-pool resources (such as local fi sheries, pastures,
irrigation systems, and forests). Common-pool resources refers to cases where one
person's consumption subtracts from the availability of consumable benefi ts to others,
but where it is diffi cult to exclude people from access to the resource.
Ostrom ( 1990 ) recognized that the tragedy of the commons argument, in tandem
with other economic arguments in the same vein, had become dominant without
being properly tested by empirical studies. Essentially these models were being
used metaphorically to invoke an image of looming disaster, and when such images
were used as the basis of policy, this made the models dangerous in her view.
Empirical studies that would provide tests of these dire predictions had in fact been
accumulating, but they were dispersed across different disciplines, were not coordi-
nated, and on their own no single case study offered defi nitive conclusions. This
situation started to change in the 1980s, as a result of a National Research Council
(NRC) Panel on Common Property Resource Management, which published its
report in 1986 (National Research Council 1986 ). The panel's steering committee
fi rst met in 1983 and quickly found that there were a large number of existing case
studies relevant to their task (Poteete et al. 2010 ). Scholars from different disciplines