Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Geography
, for instance, as well as the major focus of the Department of Human
Geography at Stockholm University, to name just one prominent example). Addi-
tionally, much subsequent scholarship has demonstrated that the stylised narrative
above is excessively Anglocentric and Eurocentric in important respects: commons
and struggles over their incorporation into evolving capitalist economies can be
found throughout the world and up to the present, not only in the past of one
country. Indeed, much of the history of colonialism is the history of colonial admin-
istrations appropriating collectively owned resources as state or private property,
in part to create labor markets, a legacy that geographers have done much to docu-
ment around the world (see, e.g., Neumann, 2005). Moreover, extra-economic
forms of accumulation appear to have played perennial and ongoing roles in capital-
ist accumulation, rather than simply setting the stage for original accumulation and
then disappearing - that is, forcible separations of producers from the means of
production are a permanent ontological feature of capitalism, rather than only an
historical precondition. Geographers working in the tradition of political economy
have been among the major contributors to the latter line of analysis (e.g., Harvey
2003; Glassman 2006; Hart 2006; see also Perelman 2000; De Angelis 2004). It
remains true, however, that enclosures of the commons in England and Scotland
were ideologically and materially central to the development of capitalism. It is thus
not surprising that ideological critiques of common property and assertions regard-
ing the superiority of private property have remained central to ongoing capitalist
development, nor that appeals to 'the commons' as an iconic alternative to capital-
ism remain prevalent and powerful. Both trends are evident in the sections that
follow.
Analysing the Commons
A major new chapter in discussions of the commons can be traced to 1968 and the
publication in
Science
by Garret Hardin, a population biologist, of an article enti-
tled, 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Hardin's article, a major text in a wave of
neo-Malthusian environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, focused on the alleged
environmental dangers posed by the rapid and seemingly exponential growth of the
world's human population. The core of his argument was that natural resources
around the globe were fi nite and that infi nite population growth upon a fi nite
resource base was impossible; therefore, continued growth of the total human popu-
lation would necessarily result, sooner or later, in a population that exceeded the
global environment's ability to support it: in the language of population biology,
the species would exceed its environment's carrying capacity, and a dramatic plunge
in its numbers would necessarily follow. From this basic logical proposition, Hardin
argued that draconian controls on reproductive rights were necessary to save human-
ity from itself. It was essentially the same argument made by Malthus, but where
Malthus focused narrowly on England and its ability to produce enough food to
feed a growing population, Hardin generalised the argument to the entire globe and
to a range of renewable and non-renewable environmental resources.
Hardin made a metaphorical model of a commons the centrepiece of his argu-
ment. He asked readers to imagine a pasture on which many commoners had
unlimited rights to graze cows. The core problem, in his view, was that each user
had strong economic incentives to overgraze, because they captured all of the eco-
nomic gain from each additional cow that they brought to graze on the common - a
