Environmental Problems: Garrett Hardin, Elinor Ostrom, By Samantha Mcbride

The Environmental problems today have been described as collective action problems. It is in fact an issue that many people in the United States are facing. The environmental problems that are faced in the United States are progressed throughout time and as it has gotten worse which caused many consequences. With such problems there must be a way to create solutions, the market has to come up with solutions as well as some political solutions. Authors such as Garrett Hardin, Elinor Ostrom, David Vogel, and Samantha McBride addressed these issues. According to the article “The Tragedy of the Commons: The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality,” by Garrett Hardin, he talks about

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (Hardin 1968:1244). With this in mind, it creates a particular denial that an individual is only looking after themselves and for their own benefit. Even though the individual is a part of that society that is being suffered, rather than trying to solve the issue the individual would deny the current circumstances because it would benefit them. The tragedy of the commons also appears in the issues that is pollution, “the rational man finds that his share of the cost of the waste he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his waste before releasing them” (Hardin 1968:1245). Such things as water and air cannot be easily regulated because it is out in the open. There are laws as well as taxing devices that create a cheaper way for the polluter to decide on the choose to pollute rather than to emit those toxins into the environment. The polluters are being careless of the environment and would rather be polluting because it would benefit them

She mentions about how the prisoner’s dilemma game is just a paradox of how a person can rationalize their strategies that would lead them to collectively irrational outcomes that “challenge a fundamental faith that rational human beings can achieve rational results” (Ostrom 1990: 5). As the collective action provides views that a person can fail to collaborate with each other to accomplish a common good. Ostrom mentions about this by explained that the tragedy of commons and prisoner’s dilemma are in fact related because they both define a way of perceiving all sorts of problems that the person faces when they try to achieve collective benefits, “whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-ride on the efforts of others. If all participants choose to free-ride, the collective benefit will not be produced. The temptation to free-ride, however, many dominate the decision process, and thus all will end up where no one wanted to be” (Ostrom 1990: 6). This is because each person has their own interest and benefits, which can result the person to think that being a part of the collective action can affect them and be too costly. They believe that the collective act is able to progress without