Question

Pollution and climate change are an example of either the Diner's Dilemma or the Tragedy of the Commons. Explain which of the them it is an example of and give reasons for your answer.

Answer 1

The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The concept and phrase originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in the British Isles.The concept became widely known over a century later due to an article written by the American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin in 1968. In this modern economic context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.

It has been argued that the very term 'tragedy of the Commons' is a misnomer, since 'the commons' referred to land resources with rights jointly owned by members of a community, and no individual outside the community had any access to the resource. However, the term is now used in social science and economics when describing a problem where all individuals have equal and open access to a resource. Hence, 'tragedy of open access regimes' or simply 'the open access problem' are more apt terms.

More general examples

Planet Earth ecology

• Uncontrolled human population growthleading to overpopulation.
• A preference for sons made people abort foetal girls. This results in an imbalanced gender ratio.
• Air, whether ambient air polluted by industrial emissions and cars among other sources of air pollution, or indoor air
• Water – Water pollution, water crisis of over-extraction of groundwater and wasting water due to overirrigation
• Forests – Frontier logging of old growth forest and slash and burn
• Energy resources and climate – Environmental residue of mining and drilling, Burning of fossil fuels and consequential global warming
• Animals – Habitat destruction and poaching leading to the Holocene mass extinction
• Human and wildlife conflict.

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