Discover the Best Books Written by Garrett Hardin

Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist. He focused his career on the issue of human overpopulation and is best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science, which called attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment." He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable."  

Garrett held hardline anti-immigrant positions as well as positions on eugenics and multiethnic that have led multiple sources to label him a white nationalist. The Southern Poverty Law Center called his publications "frank in their racism and quasi-fascist ethnonationalism." Hardin received a BS in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from Stanford University in 1941, where his dissertation research addressed symbiosis among microorganisms. 

Moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1946, he served there as a Professor of Human Ecology from 1963 until his (nominal) retirement in 1978. He was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. A major focus of his career, and one to which he returned repeatedly, was the issue of human overpopulation. This led to writings on controversial subjects such as advocating abortion rights, which earned him criticism from the political right, and advocating strict limits to all immigration, which earned him criticism from the political left. 

In his essays, he also tackled subjects such as conservation and creationism. He was also a proponent of eugenics and a vice president of the American Eugenics Society. In 1968, Hardin applied his conceptual model developed in his essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" to human population growth, the use of the Earth's natural resources, and the welfare state. His essay cited an 1833 pamphlet by the English economist William Forster Lloyd which included an example of herders sharing a common parcel of land, which would lead to overgrazing.

Hardin blamed the welfare state for allowing the tragedy of the commons; where the state provides for children and supports over-breeding as a fundamental human right, Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable. Hardin stated in his analysis of the tragedy of the commons that "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."  Environmental historians Joachim Radkau, Alfred Thomas Grove, and Oliver Rackham criticized Hardin "as an American with no notion at all how Commons actually work."

In addition, Hardin's pessimistic outlook was subsequently contradicted by Elinor Ostrom's later work on the success of cooperative structures like the management of common land, for which she shared the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver E. Williamson. In contrast to Hardin, they stated neither commons nor "Allende" in the generic nor classical meaning is bound to fail; to the contrary, "the wealth of the commons" has gained renewed interest in the scientific community. 

Hardin's work was also criticized as historically inaccurate in failing to account for the demographic transition and for failing to distinguish between common property and open-access resources. Despite the criticisms, the theory has nonetheless been influential. In 1993, Garrett Hardin published Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos, which he described at the time as a summation of all his previous works. 

The book won the 1993 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. In the book, he argues that the natural sciences are grounded in the concept of limits (such as the speed of light). In contrast, social sciences, such as economics, are grounded in concepts that have no limits (such as the widespread "infinite-Earth" economic models). 

He notes that most of the more notable scientific (as opposed to political) debates concerning ecological economics are between natural scientists, such as Paul R. Ehrlich, and economists, such as Julian Simon, one of Ehrlich's most well-known and vocal detractors. A strong theme throughout the book is that economics, as a discipline, can be as much about mythology and ideology as it is about real science.