Part of what defines home is a set of nested boundaries. The exterior of one’s own house or shelter: walls, a door, a gate, even a meager tent flap. A neighborhood. A city limit. A state or national border. We mark the edge that differentiates the place where we belong from the space beyond.
But the process of drawing edges and borders—between private and shared, home and not-home, here and elsewhere—is often fraught. Some efforts at boundary-delineation are actually land grabs (as in the numerous instances in U.S. history in which Indigenous lands were divided into lots and given away to European American settlers for farming). Some cruelly demarcate the edges of discrimination (as in racial housing covenants). “BUILD THE WALL” was the rallying cry of the Trump years, a line separating who is part of America and who is not, a symbol of nativism and nationalism. Others are efforts to separate humans from nature, boundaries that can be all too easy to breach (as in the levees between the Mississippi and the neighborhoods of New Orleans that failed during Hurricane Katrina).
Still it is possible and necessary to set ethical limits around human space and movement—fence land for dogs or livestock to roam; demarcate the edges of parklands or schoolyards; calculate the boundaries of a floodplain and attempt to keep home building out of the path of deluges; map the basin of a drinking-water reservoir to ensure that poisons and contaminants do not ooze into it.
In an era of climate change, we need also to recognize one ultimate limit, the outer edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.* For all practical intents, the edges of this round planet are the boundaries of human life for the foreseeable future.
More than a decade ago, scientists revealed the results of a set of models that determined how to maintain safe conditions on Earth for human life. The first of these studies, published in 2008, was straightforwardly focused on carbon dioxide. The second, in 2009—with the evocative title “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity”—defined thresholds for several aspects of the global human home, including the acidity of the oceans and the rate of species extinction. What were the boundaries of a world in which humans could continue to operate—grow food, have access to adequate water, and face a level of risk (such as from disasters like flooding or hurricane or drought) that could still be manageable and survivable? What lines must not be crossed? James Hansen, then based at NASA—one of the first scientists to forthrightly warn Americans, in the 1980s, that climate change would be a major existential crisis—was a coauthor of both papers.
The original definition of threshold is tactile: “The piece of timber or stone which lies below the bottom of a door, and has to be crossed in entering a house.” In science, a threshold describes an abrupt boundary between one condition and another. One moment you are in one state of existence, and the next, you have entered an entirely different terrain or set of circumstances. Ice melts into water. An object under strain, like an overloaded and sagging bridge, finally collapses. If you cross some thresholds, it is possible to return. A bridge can be repaired. A person with an illness may sometimes recover and return to a state of full health. If you cross others, the door closes behind you. Among the starkest of these crossings is the end of life—once a heart stops beating for long enough, we cannot pull someone across the threshold from death back into life—at least not with any existing medical technology.
The “safe operating space” Hansen and his colleagues calculated for atmospheric carbon dioxide—the planet where humans could reasonably continue to pursue life and civilization—was 350 parts per million. But the specific number itself was less important than another piece of information. The carbon dioxide concentration in 2009 had already reached 387 parts per million. According to Hansen and his colleagues’ analyses, humans had not merely pushed the planet past the threshold. We had left home altogether and were beginning to run toward the edge of a precipice.
Some doors have already closed behind us. (The seas will likely keep rising irreversibly for centuries, though human decisions about carbon emissions still influence how rapid or catastrophic this process becomes.) Still, the scientists suggested that we might reverse course and walk back through the door to a safer Earth.
To do this, we as a species and a global society would need to collectively share the atmospheric space. We would need to come up with limits and boundaries at every level—in our communities, within our respective countries, and through international agreements—to protect our planetary home.
Unfortunately, many of our society’s most enduring notions about the setting of boundaries and the sharing of resources within them come from “the dismal science” (aka, economics) and social Darwinism (a distortion of evolutionary theory that proposes that human cultural groups should tussle for “survival of the fittest” in order to better the human species), a grim combination indeed. Because these ideas are so entrenched, it’s hard for many of us to imagine any positive outcome from the face-off between human desires and ecological limits.
In 1833, the British economist and professor William Forster Lloyd published Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, his ruminations on the usefulness or alleged folly of childbearing among the poor, given cold economic calculations about the food supply. Most of his ideas weren’t particularly original but echoed the influential (though also controversial) scholar Thomas Malthus—who had offered up similar analyses of population growth three decades earlier. Lloyd mixed in his own metaphors about communal grazing, in which pastoralists let their sheep congregate on shared or public pasture. His reasoning wasn’t based on empirical evidence. Rather, he conjured a hypothetical case of abused pastoral land: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted?” he wrote. “Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures?” The cause of this sorry condition: human nature. According to Lloyd, anyone who kept a herd on a shared pasture would want to reap the benefit of adding just one more animal than their neighbors but would only suffer a fraction of the consequent cost of overgrazing and losing some of the land’s productivity. So people would inevitably mishandle shared property—each rancher or herder putting extra cattle out to pasture until the fodder is scarce, the land ruined, and the animals half-starved. The solution, he insisted, was privatization. “The common reasons for the establishment of private property in land are deduced from the necessity of offering to individuals sufficient motives for cultivating the ground.” Under private ownership, each household would manage its own pasture and bear the full cost of its degradation, and therefore have greater incentive not to tear the place up, thought Lloyd.
Lloyd’s name might have slipped into obscurity had it not been dredged up, a century later, by a biologist named Garrett Hardin, who taught for thirty years at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 1968, writing in the journal Science, Hardin penned one of the most influential essays of the twenty-first century, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” based partly on Lloyd’s writing about pastures. Hardin postulated that selfish human nature would always befoul shared resources. And he extended Lloyd’s grazing metaphor to the atmosphere and the oceans. All of these “commons” would inevitably be trashed if people were left to their own devices. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush,” he wrote, “each pursuing his own best interest.”
The only solution, in Hardin’s thinking, was either privatization (capitalism) or heavy-handed, top-down, even draconian intervention (such as centralized Soviet-style socialism)—especially with regard to overpopulation.
Hardin’s ideas about human scarcity and the commons were also directly linked to his own misanthropy. Social Darwinism, which also argues that some cultural groups are inherently “fitter” than others, is the basis of a number of blatantly racist ideas and ideologies—including eugenics, a racist and ableist notion that humans could improve our species if we only allowed “desirable” people to have children. In some of the less-frequently quoted passages of his 1968 paper, Hardin’s words were tinged with the logic of both social Darwinism and eugenics: “It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance—that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” In other words, the “desirables” of society should inherit more of the Earth than the “undesirables.” Elsewhere in his writing, he wasn’t so subtle about his racist and nativist views. He railed against the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In later work, he compared rich nations to lifeboats with finite resources and capacity, arguing that letting those from poor nations aboard would swamp the boat. He argued in favor of forced sterilization. He insisted that rich nations should not deliver food aid to poor nations, because it would encourage them to “breed.” He went on to serve on the board of a white nationalist publishing outlet, where he contributed commentaries sometimes steeped in Islamophobia and fears that Muslims would “outbreed” whites and cause the “genocide” of Northern-European-based cultures simply by outnumbering them. “A multiethnic society is a disaster,” he opined.
But a large number of scholars tried to peel apart Hardin’s academic ideas and separate them from the ugliness of his racial and cultural views. Politely stripped and whitewashed, the “tragedy of the commons” quickly became conventional wisdom. A 1985 essay in American Zoologist on environmental education suggested Hardin’s essay should be “required reading for all students … and, if I had my way, for all human beings.” The essay has been cited more than forty-five thousand times in academic literature alone since it was first published and still appears today—without irony or critique—in TED talks, contemporary business and financial writing, environmental analyses, and scientific discussions about evolutionary biology.
We carry in our minds this misanthropic story that humans can never responsibly share a home or a pasture on this blue watery planet—that selfishly trashing our surroundings and fighting over what remains is our birthright.
As a result, many of us imagine we can save ourselves only by building high walls around our own particular plot of ground and preparing to fight anyone who might trespass.
Too often, we cling to this grim and questionable logic. But it is impossible to permanently wall off the sky or the rain or the swelling ocean. We are inextricably bound to one another by the common Earth we all live on.
Around the same time that Garrett Hardin was contemplating tragedy, a political scientist named Elinor Scott (better known later on as Elinor Ostrom) undertook a quiet, scholarly pilgrimage through the Los Angeles area to learn how people there used groundwater, an important water source for dozens of cities in the region.
Born in Los Angeles and raised there through the Great Depression mostly by her mother, a musician (after her father, a set designer, left the family when she was young), Elinor learned to make do with limited means. But her mother clamored to get her admitted to an elite high school, where she was surrounded by wealthier students. She became the first in her family to get a college degree—even though her mother “saw no reason whatsoever for me to do that.” At the time, even fewer people could imagine the usefulness of a woman pursuing an advanced degree. But Elinor was passionate about learning and enrolled in UCLA’s graduate program in political science in 1957—and divorced her first husband in large part because he objected. There she studied with a professor named Vincent Ostrom, whom she married a few years later. Vincent was an expert in Western resources and had studied strategies for sharing various kinds of commons, such as water, while avoiding “patterns of mutual destruction,” as he explained in a documentary later in his life.
Groundwater was another kind of commons. From the 1920s onward, people living above the Central and West Coast Groundwater Basins of Los Angeles—underground reservoirs stretching across 420 square miles, from beneath Long Beach (near the Port of Los Angeles) up to Hollywood—had been using groundwater a bit too voraciously, faster than the rainfall could replenish it. Wells were deepened and powerful pumps installed to slurp from the sinking water table. Seawater trickled in—the salt penetrating freshwater supplies and creeping inland, threatening the entire basin. In the 1940s, school and park lawns started to die when they were watered from salty parts of the aquifer. But by the 1960s, the crisis had mostly been averted, the aquifer saved from destruction. (Four decades later, the water levels in the western aquifer had actually risen about thirty feet.) Elinor wanted to understand how. She was searching for answers to the same question as Hardin: How do people manage a common resource? However, she was more interested in gathering evidence than in holding forth. She sifted through memos and correspondence, sat in on meetings, and interviewed water users throughout the area.
In this case a large part of the problem turned out to be, in fact, privatization—an ineffective and convoluted system of laws that created incentives for people to overdraft and waste water in order to claim private rights to use it. But after the U.S. Geological Survey and the Los Angeles Flood Control District reported that salt could soon wreck the whole basin, various water companies, industrial users, and landowners started an association to agree to constrain their water use. Voters set up what’s called a “watermaster,” the Water Replenishment District of Southern California, to watch over all these enterprises.
One could easily take a dim view of the murky bureaucracy (described in somewhat painful detail in Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons) required to manage the region’s water supplies. The whole process was legally costly, although, as Ostrom points out, an order of magnitude less expensive than losing all of that groundwater. The result was no bright, green, perfect utopia. (Essayist and former city official D. J. Waldie writes that questionable practices have leached into the LA regional water boards in more recent years, and local water politics still need reform.) But it has been no tragedy either. People saw the possibility for ruin on the horizon and stopped. Today, LA’s approach to groundwater management may also help the region cope with climate change. LA’s water supply relies heavily on the Colorado River Aqueduct—a massive engineering project that draws water across the desert to the city. But that water is fed by a now-dwindling mountain snowpack. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is now considering erecting a wastewater recycling plant that would help replenish nearby groundwater basins. Those basins, still around because of the groundwater that was saved and protected decades ago, give parts of LA an alternative source of water as the Colorado becomes less reliable. LA’s response to its past problems has made it far easier for the region to manage present and future strains on its water supply.
And notably, the resource remains shared, not divided (as Hardin might have insisted was necessary). “No one ‘owns’ the basins themselves,” writes Ostrom. She calls the management of LA’s aquifers “polycentric.”
Polycentric, not iron-fisted or heavy-handed but grassroots, democratic, collaborative, cooperative, and messy. Complex like nature itself, many parts involved. Like the ripples in a lake surface after rain, waves emanating from many droplets. A cacophonous flock of birds seen from a great distance, suddenly a self-organizing pattern of wingbeats and trills. A murmuration. Circles of responsibility and care overlapping one another. People elbowing each other noisily to reach a system, a working solution that will have to change and change again.
In 1973, five years after the publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Elinor and Vincent and colleagues set up a research center at Indiana University in Bloomington, where they had both taken posts in the political science department, to study what actually happens when people manage common property, sometimes for many generations, even centuries. They collected examples from around the world—communally managed forests in Japan and Mexico and Nepal, shared cattle pastures in the Swiss Alps, cooperative irrigation societies in the Philippines and Spain.†
In 2009—the moment when climate scientists announced that humans were no longer living in a “safe operating space”—Elinor Ostrom became the first and, at the time of this writing, still the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Her win was a shock to those in the field of economics. Business and finance journalist John Cassidy, commenting in the New Yorker, called her “positively obscure,” and murmurs of disapproval buzzed among the practitioners of the dismal science.
But if you read her work closely—in between all of the descriptions of labyrinthine systems for handling watersheds or fishing or community gardens—you can see something revolutionary. Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their colleagues have amassed a vast body of evidence that people can in fact drink from the same well, literally and figuratively, or fish from the same lake, or take up space under the same sky without detriment. But doing so always requires some complex housekeeping—to ensure that everything is transparent, that anyone who takes more than their share faces consequences, that conflicts can be resolved. Communal resources also have “clearly defined boundaries,” writes Elinor; everyone has to know the limits, the walls, the edges, the rules of their shared space and their particular rights and roles within it. And these systems are tailored and adapted to the particular conditions, cultures, and needs of a specific place—fundamentally grassroots, as diverse as the regions they operate in. Each of these systems springs from a sense of shared belonging—a sense of home.
In the years since, Elinor Ostrom has been popularized as the woman who “disproved” the tragedy of the commons. But Elinor herself took issue with this characterization. Hardin “was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously,” she said in an interview with YES! magazine. “It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.” Tragedies can still result when people choose to compete rather than communicate and cooperate, to fight over a resource instead of resolving to conserve it together.
But if Ostrom didn’t rule out all of Hardin’s ideas, at least she showed us that we have a choice. We don’t have to write that tragedy. We don’t have to divide the Earth into billions of little allotments or fiefdoms and put up walls to keep our neighbors out of our personal space. Nor do we need to build a dystopia. No iron-fisted ruler, no draconian policies or denial of human rights will save the planet we live on. In fact, either of those strategies could almost ensure ruination.‡
After careful observation, Ostrom suggested that what we need to do is much harder, much more complicated, much more diffuse and diverse, and much more democratic.
The atmosphere of the Earth is also a commons, not unlike a pasture or a groundwater basin. But it is both invisible and global, vaster than our imaginations and therefore bewildering to try to manage.
The climate crisis is not really a tragedy of the commons, however. We do not each have an equal share of the sky (as Doria Robinson has pointed out) nor have we had collective say over what happens to it. Climate change is another kind of calamity—largely caused, not solved, by the actions of certain powerful private enterprises, and by inequality, a lack of transparency, and outright denial and deception. According to one analysis, since the mid-nineteenth century, just ninety companies have borne the responsibility for two-thirds of greenhouse-gas emissions (and the company that has done the most, that has taken up the largest share of the atmosphere, is none other than Chevron, the company operating the Richmond oil refinery). Every year, some of these same companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against laws that would set boundaries and limits on the emissions that cause climate change. Since at least the late 1970s—before the public understood what climate change was—fossil fuel companies and energy moguls have known that their emissions could drive the planet toward dangerous levels of warming. But instead of acting responsibly, they underwrote disinformation campaigns designed to confuse the public about the scientific findings. This colossal theft from the global public, this extraordinary act of deception, has been documented by reams of evidence from the world’s leading journalists and academics.§ In social science, the technical term for a freeloader or a mooch who robs the public is a free rider. The fossil fuel industry seems to want a free and endless ride around the planet, the unfettered opportunity to use this atmosphere to turn as much profit as possible and leave everyone else to wrangle with the long-term costs.
It is up to the rest of us to hold the boundaries, build the metaphorical fences, and rein in the problem. In the same month that she won the Nobel, Elinor Ostrom also wrote up some of her own ideas for the World Bank about how this kind of regulatory process might work for carbon emissions. Her discussion of the subject was not so different from the story she’d told about any other shared resource. In essence, there would need to be polycentric solutions—at every level, in cities, towns, regions, states, and nations, tailored to the particular places where we all belong. And at every level, a climate-master of sorts (like a watermaster) would have to stop the free riders. In February 2012, four months before her death from pancreatic cancer, she published another set of thoughts in an academic paper calling for solutions at many scales to address climate change. “A global strategy is frequently posited as the only strategy needed,” she wrote. But “if not backed up by a variety of efforts at national, regional, and local levels,” global solutions “are not guaranteed to work effectively.” The work of safeguarding a livable planet would require a proliferation of such efforts, and people might have to push hard from the grass roots before the world would follow.
To date, governments around the world, under heavy political pressure from these same polluting corporations, have not taken much action against fossil fuel companies nor implemented serious-enough rules on carbon dioxide. Even the Paris Climate Agreement, heralded as one of the world’s most promising political accomplishments on climate change, doesn’t establish real means of halting a free rider or of setting well-enforced atmospheric boundaries for the countries involved.
The burden of trying to hold these decision-makers to account has been taken up primarily by a growing number of grassroots activists around the world. In 2008, a group of young activists at Middlebury College in Vermont, along with climate journalist and author Bill McKibben, took James Hansen’s threshold for keeping the planet safe as the name of their organization, 350.org, now one of the largest and most recognized climate justice networks in the world. Their initial stated goal was to “make sure everyone knows the target so that our political leaders feel real pressure to act.”
Since then, the diversity, creativity, and ferocity of the climate movement has been awe-inspiring. It has also drawn strength and power from the ethic of home expressed by communities like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose residents camped through the frigid North Dakota winter of 2016 to 2017 to try to prevent another oil conduit—the Dakota Access Pipeline—from crossing their ancestral lands. (The protest wasn’t successful at halting the pipeline project during the Trump administration, but it spurred national outrage. In 2020, legal actions brought by tribes forced the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a more extensive environmental review.) The movement has also been buoyed by diffuse localized efforts—from solar on rooftops to community gardens to green building initiatives—and has begun to find solidarity with larger political protest movements, including Black Lives Matter. In the summer of 2020, the Sunrise Movement, a climate justice network led by Gen Z, made that alliance abundantly clear in a plea on its website: “We must see the fights for racial justice and climate action as two fronts of the same fight. If our society valued Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in with climate change in the first place.”
Simultaneously, the climate movement has flowered on a global stage. In September 2019, millions of people joined a strike comprising thousands of events around the world—inspired by the Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg—to demand that governments take ambitious steps to combat climate change.
But even a movement this powerful has not yet been enough. More than a decade after 350 became “the most important number on the planet,” in the words of Bill McKibben, the measurement of atmospheric carbon at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawai‘i reached nearly 420 parts per million. By the time you read this, it may be higher still.
The free riders are still driving us inexorably beyond the limits of what is safe, and I wonder if too many of us are waiting for some iron fist of global government to save us. I wonder what it would mean if we all fully grasped that this is a fight for our homes and our safety. What if more of us stepped forward to defend the space above us, the ground beneath us? What if we took charge everywhere, to create new rules, to draw boundaries around the places we care about and insist together that they cannot be crossed? We hold this one planetary home in common, and it is both unethical and disastrous to continue to allow a few bad actors to decide what happens under our shared sky.