Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Elinor Ostrum, 1933-2012

When Italian-English explorer John Cabot “discovered” the island of Newfoundland in 1497, he marveled at the ocean’s abundance of North Atlantic cod. Cabot’s journals claim his men could fill their stocks by simply dangling baskets overboard. When English printers published news of Cabot’s discovery, commercial fishers flocked to what became Canada. But, as Cabot sailed with Bristol seamen, some historians suspect that Bristol fishers harvested the waters now called the Grand Banks even before Columbus.

Elinor Ostrum is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Her reputation rests mainly on her first book, 1990’s Governing the Commons. In this book, Ostrum demonstrates how traditional agrarian societies manage commonly owned resources, like pastureland. She commences the book by describing how a Turkish fishing village partitioned access to their patch in the Aegean Sea, ensuring everybody has equal access to prime waters without depriving anyone else.

I remember reading Ostrum’s description of folk governance and thinking: that sounds great, but one diesel-powered trawler with a five-mile line could ruin that arrangement for everyone. Ostrum wrote her book to refute Garrett Hardin’s 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons, which postulates that humans will inevitably exhaust commonly held property. Generations of economists, like Ostrum, rebut Hardin’s claim by noting that, for centuries, humans didn’t exhaust the commons; that’s a Twentieth Century phenomenon.

Archeological evidence suggests that Newfoundland was the last part of the Americas to receive permanent human settlement. But the Maritime Archaic people, a lost culture known only by their artifacts, settled the island around 9,000 years ago, and humans have occupied the island ever since. Humans, both indigenous nations and European colonists, survived side-by-side with Newfoundland’s caribou herds, abundant timber, and Grand Banks fisheries for centuries, and all four flourished. The relationship seems highly reciprocal.

Now the timber, caribou, and fisheries are critically endangered. Deep-water fishing, once an artisanal trade conducted with hand tools in wooden vessels, is now performed commercially by steel-hulled ships with diesel engines and massive refrigerator compartments. Those who could afford these massive pollution machines could haul enough catch to feed the lucrative European and North American markets, while artisans lost revenue on scale. This became an embodiment of that capitalist truism: Them that has, gets.

Garrett Hardin, 1915-2003

Garrett Hardin based his treatise on the theories of Thomas Malthus and the behavior of single-celled organisms in laboratories. Malthus claimed that humans’ ability to procreate will inevitably exceed nature’s ability to grow food, leading to resource depletion and catastrophic die-offs, which Hardin verified among paramecia, which exhaust all their food, then starve. Malthus (a former clergyman) believed the most charitable action was to let the poor die. Hardin preferred benevolent intrusions into market economics.

These conclusions contain stacked assumptions. Malthus assumed that conditions he observed among Surrey peasant farmers, in a historically unique time of economic upheaval, represented humanity overall. Hardin assumed that microorganisms in laboratories behaved like wild microfauna. Both are wrong for comically obvious reasons. Surrey was heavily impoverished by aristocrats adjusting poorly to the rapid transition to industrial capitalism, while lab samples don’t reflect wild conditions, where food replenishes itself, while predators thin the wild microbiome.

For centuries, humans managed natural resources fairly responsibly. This includes indigenous American populations, which (generally) regarded land husbandry as sacred duty, and Europeans, who simply lived on the land they worked. Then the Enclosure Movement happened. Once-shared resources, like Hardin’s hypothetical pastureland, became private property, which one could license to exploit. Same with mineral resources, wild game, and even residential land. Communities, which once governed resources jointly, became atomized, competing for access to scarce staples.

Newfoundland fisheries didn’t collapse because “fishers” depleted the ecosystem; they collapsed because industrial trawlers depleted the ecosystem. And industrial trawlers happened because the government distributed fishing licenses, subsidized oil extraction, and collected taxes in ways that disadvantaged small operators. The Grand Banks yielded a record haul in 1968, then fell precipitously; yields tumbled around ninety percent in five years. A two-year federal fishing moratorium, introduced in 1992, has been extended indefinitely for over thirty years.

In other words, technology and policy combined to endanger the once-lush Grand Banks. Because humans assumed the trend lines would continue forever, they made no transitional plans; Newfoundland’s economy collapsed overnight. This bears consideration, not just for Hardin and Ostrum’s debates, but because it can happen again. As America has recently drawn in its own record harvests, powered by million-dollar equipment and ammonia-based fertilizer, we must think carefully about whether we’re following the same path.

The chain of thought continues in Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2