It doesn’t have to be this way. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Tourism in Prague, David Brown
“I hear about the business and political corruption in the Czech Republic, and I think, well, what about the US? People dwell on this or that problem and it occurs to me that maybe certain foreigners and academics just need to have something to talk about, to make them feel needed, or if not actually needed, then at least that’s there’s some general reason for them to be here in the first place. It has become my habit to return to Prague every year or so for a few months at a time, and for the most part everything looks all right to me – particularly when I’m carrying a fairly well-padded wallet in my back pocket.
But the longer I stay, the harder it is for me to remain silent about certain things, including, what I regard as the travesty taking place in the city center as a result of too much of a good thing gone unchecked. The argument over sausage stands in Wenceslas Square is but the tip of the iceberg, and largely misses the point. The intermittent hand wringing regarding the stag parties is not enough. What’s needed is a top down rethinking of how to handle mass scale tourism.”
—Excerpt from “Tourism in Prague”, David Brown. The New Presence. (click link to read full article)
The Human Social-Economic Habitat and the Environment, David Brown
“Although firmly rooted in the economic theory of market failure,2 the Tragedy of the Commons3 has come to stand first and foremost for the quintessential environmental perspective from which so many important environmental concepts flow that its roots in economics can easily become something of an afterthought. It can be said in this respect to represent environmentalism writ large: the proposition that the natural world is subject to abuse because it belongs to everyone and no one at the same time, or in economic terms, a matter of market failure due to non-internalized negative externalities.4
The example given by the author of free riders over- grazing cows doing irreparable damage to a shared field (the commons) has provided generations of environmental students an easily comprehendible way of visualizing a complex phenomenon, similar to the way the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ serves as shorthand for understanding the complex and sill ‘evolving’ concept of evolutionary change. From this simple example of unintentional economic exploitation of the commons it is easy to extrapolate to a host of real world environmental problems relating to commons large and small: the factory polluting the air we breathe, the municipal sewage polluting the water we drink, on a larger scale, the oceans that are overfished, and on a larger scale still, the air of the entire planet suffering from carbon choking climate change. In addition to the concept of irreparable harm to the natural environment committed without intention or even, in some cases, negligence, the tangential idea of broad based prescriptive environmental regulation rather than after-the-fact individualized piecemeal judicial actions based on fault firmly took hold as the principle means of tackling environmental problems in the US and around the world. This, in turn, led to the current emphasis on pollution prevention5 rather than simply amelioration and rehabilitation.
Written at the cusp of the environmental revolution of the late 1960s, The Tragedy of the Commons was one of a handful of publication such as Silent Spring6, and Should Trees Have Standing?7 that helped garner the modern environmental movement. It has withstood countless rebuttals and attacks, perhaps most famously by Ronald Coase whose article (widely cited as a rebuttal to Hardin was actually written prior to the Tragedy of the Commons is only slightly less well known than Hardin’s8, and more recently, in a rebuttal published in the NY Times.9 As alluded to above, so compelling is Hardin’s homily that we sometimes forget that the concept of negative externalities as a form of market failure that Hardin applied to the commons had long been recognized by economists. Cross-fertilization of economic theory not just with environmentalism but with other disciplines has become commonplace, including the broad embrace of cost-benefit and other economic analysis to what’s widely known as the Chicago school of legal thought.10”
Copyright © 2015 by David B. Brown