About Garrett Hardin: Garrett James Hardin is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "You cannot do only one thing",[page needed] which "modestly implies that there is at least one unwanted consequence".
Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.
The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.
Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to ...
In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
