Dr. Garrett Hardin: Overpopulation, Survival and Morality

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PLOWBOY: But wouldn't such "wild" areas have to be controlled?

HARDIN: Of course. You can't just open the wilderness up to everybody at once -as our national parks were doing until recently-because that creates a Commons ... and guarantees the eventual destruction of the forest, desert, or what have you.

PLOWBOY: In your attempts to explain the concept of the Commons—and other such ideas—to the public, you've come up with a number of little slogans called "pejorisms". Could you perhaps give us an example of these?

HARDIN: Well, yes ... pejorisms—the word is taken from "pejoration' : a change for the worse—are tough little statements, usually negative, the people to look at old problems in new ways. One of my favorites-which I can't take credit for—is a reworking of the laws of thermodynamics. You see, a physicist—who regards these rules as the tools of his or her science—would probably state the laws something like this: [1] When mechanical work is transformed into heat, or vice versa, the quantity of work will always equal the amount of heat. And [2] it is impossible—in a self-sustaining process—for heat to move from a colder to a hotter body.

Ecologists, however-wanting to emphasize different implications of these laws-reworked them into pejorisms which state: [1] You can't win, [2] you are sure to lose, and [3] there's no way to get out of the game. The meaning of the rules isn't really changed by this transformation, but they hit harder because they're phrased in everyday language. And We pejorism are true . . we can't get out of the energy game, we always have to have a source of power—which is primarily the sun—and that source is sure, one day, to burn out.

PLOWBOY: The trick, then, is to see how well we can utilize that finite resource.

HARDIN: Sure. We have no control over the sun, so all we can do is make good use of its energy as it comes to to day by day That's all the freedom we have ... to make the best possible use of each day's sunshine. Of course, we've cheated considerably by using fossil sunlight ... oil, coal, and gas. We're still doing so, but those resources will soon come to an end ... Waving us with only sunlight, and perhaps nuclear energy. The latter is, of course, a problem of a different sort ... I feel that it's a terribly dangerous source of power.

PLOWBOY: There are many people who claim that civilization can't survive without developing nuclear resources.

HARDIN: A civilization that can't survive without atomic energy can't survive with it! The proponents of nuclear development are actually saying that we are unable to live on a constant energy level. And—once their contention is put in these terms—I think it becomes plainly ridiculous. Most societies, in most times, have lived on a constant energy level.

We've only started escalating our power consumption in the past 200 years. Are we to believe, then, that there were no civilizations in existence more than 200 years ago? Ito, our race has lived within an energy "budget" in the past, and we can do it again. But the transition is going to lead to terrible political battles, some of which may well be going on by the time this interview reaches your readers!

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