Dorsey - Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas

CREATURES OF THE CONTESTED DEEP

William Cronon

IN 1968, THE BIOLOGIST GARRETT HARDIN PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE IN Science that became an instant environmental classic. Entitled The Tragedy of the Commons, it offered a moral fable about medieval peasants who destroyed their shared pastures by gradually adding more and more grazing animals until the carrying capacity of the land collapsed, with devastating consequences for all concerned. What made Hardin's essay so striking was his claim that the peasants destroyed their own prosperity precisely because their behavior was the only rational choice available to them. The crux of his argument was that individual peasants got all the profits from selling each new animal they added to the pasture, whereas the small incremental harm caused by that animal was shared by everyone in common. From an individual's point of view, it made perfect sense to add more animals since their environmental costs were mainly borne by everyone else. Furthermore, if a few enlightened peasants resisted adding animals to the commons in an effort to conserve the pasture, their neighbors would simply add more animals to gain the incremental profits for themselves. Under such circumstances, the only intelligent thing to do was to keep adding animals to earn as much individual profit as possibleuntil the inevitable collapse brought the whole weirdly rational game to a catastrophic halt.

Hardin did not originate this important argument, though the evocative title he chose for his essay has associated his name with it ever since. Environmental problems arising from market failures involving property held in common had first been described decades earlier by fisherieseconomists working on what they called the fisherman's problem. That story will be familiar to anyone who has read Arthur McEvoy's classic 1986 book of the same title. The puzzle these economists had tried to solve was why fishing fleets seem almost inevitably to overharvest the animals on which their own profitability depends. The answer was essentially the same as for Hardin's peasants. Individual fishers had no incentive not to harvest more fish, since if they failed to do so their competitors would just grab those profits for themselves. Rather than limit their catch in an enlightened effort to protect the stocks on which they all depended, fishing fleets harvested with competitive abandon until the resource collapsed. The problem was compounded by the enormous uncertainties involved in estimating fish populations that ranged vast distances beneath the surface of the water, a challenge Hardin's peasants never faced. The only solution to this paradox, the fisheries economists argued, was either to privatize fish by creating property rights that gave fishers incentives to conserve them or to keep the harvest sustainable by imposing government regulations that would limit the catch by size or duration.

McEvoy demonstrated the ways in which this seemingly universal economic modelwhich everyone now calls the tragedy of the commonsdoes not do full justice to the cultural and historical complexities involved in harvesting fish or any other common property resource. In fact, the rationality of overharvesting mainly arises under conditions of uncontrolled market competition, which have been much more the exception than the rule over the sweep of human history. Any number of mechanisms, ranging from cultural norms to religious rituals to state regulations, have been relatively effective in avoiding the fisherman's problemmedieval peasants themselves rarely behaved in the ways Hardin ascribed to themso that treating the tragedy of the commons as a universal law of human nature turns out to be deeply misleading. It nonetheless offers important insights into the causes of overfishing in the modern era, and the reasons why governments have so often resorted to regulations to protect fisheries.

But there is an additional problem that McEvoy, writing mainly about fisheries in California, did not need to address at length. Wild animals do not honor national boundaries. Moreover, such boundaries are especially challenging to define and defend in the waters of the open ocean, which is why they have so often been a source of international conflict. Ifthe tragedy of the commons is best solved by state interventionwhether through regulation or the creation of property rightsuncertainties about the effectiveness of state power in maritime environments mean that the challenge of avoiding the fisherman's problem is not merely economic, but legal, political, and diplomatic as well.

This is why Kurk Dorsey's book, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas, is such an important contribution, with implications that are as far-reaching as McEvoy's and Hardin's. Dorsey helped pioneer the field of diplomatic environmental history with his