Garrett Hardin, Ph.D.—biologist, environmental ethicist, and
lightning rod for controversy for over four decades—died in a
double suicide with his wife in September 2003 at his longtime home in
Santa Barbara, where he was a Professor Emeritus of Human Biology at
the University of California. Both Hardins had been ill for some time
and in fact were leaders in the local chapter of the Hemlock Society,
the “right-to-die” advocacy organization.
Hardin was my undergraduate advisor, and I kept in touch with him
through the years. Some time ago, one of the major environmental
organizations mailed out an appeal for contributions, accompanied by a
brochure listing “the most important environmental issues for the
future.” On the list were most of the now-familiar and undeniably
serious problems our planet faces: pollution, the greenhouse effect,
threatened wildlife and rainforests, and so on. At first glance it
appeared to be a comprehensive list, but to my eyes there was a glaring
omission—the most fundamental environmental problem was missing
entirely. That problem is population, or more specifically, human
overpopulation.
When I showed this list to Garrett Hardin and voiced my concern about
the omission, his response was characteristically pragmatic:
“Isn't that interesting,” he said with a chuckle.
“But not surprising. My guess is that population did come up when
they were putting together that list, and they probably decided not to
include it because they didn't know what to do about it—and
because they'd only get called names if they did suggest
anything!”
Hardin did not set out to become controversial. Nor did he expect to
make a career of challenging conventional wisdoms, often on topics
where discussion was implicitly forbidden in polite society. But over
40 years of teaching, writing, lecturing, and testifying on “any
controversial problem that has a biological component,” Hardin
developed a worldwide reputation for stirring up debate and emotion
regarding issues such as abortion, foreign aid, immigration,
wilderness, nuclear energy, and his underlying perennial topic of
population. In so doing, he earned himself nicknames like “the
bad boy of biology,” “the ecologist with an edge,”
“the original thinker's original thinker”—all
monikers he probably found flattering in some way. There were also
other less charitable labels and epithets directed his way. Hardin
described himself as an “ecoconservative,” a seemingly
contradictory but innocuous enough term until the implications of some
of his arguments sink in.
Born in Texas in 1915, Hardin recalled that he decided on a career in
science early on but quite by chance. “I just liked some of my
teachers,” he recalled. “That may not be a logical way to
choose one's life work, but it might be as good as any other
way.” He earned a Bachelor's degree in zoology from the
University of Chicago and a Stanford University doctorate in biology.
As a member of the Biology Department at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, he authored a widely used college text and, by the
1950s, began producing the prolific flow of journal articles,
editorials, books, and popular writings that earned him his reputation
and notoriety.
Hardin's recurring themes include the negative impacts of
collective denial of unpleasant biological and ecological realities
(the title of one of his collections of essays is Stalking the Wild
Taboo), the ecological necessity of attaching responsibilities to
the right to procreate and the use of resources, and the impossibility
of action without repercussion in an ecological system. His most famous
article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” first appeared in
Science in 1968 and presented such a strikingly different
conception of the then newly recognized environmental crisis that it is
still widely considered a landmark in modern thought. In his subsequent
and even more infamous article “Living on a Lifeboat,” he
applied the “commons” reasoning to foreign aid, concluding
that in the long run such well-intentioned charity is likely to do more
harm than good.
A soft-spoken, grandfatherly man who was quick to laugh, Hardin in
person appeared an unlikely firebrand. Excerpts from his wide-ranging
observations, from an interview done in the mid 1990s, give a flavor of
his thoughts. Even many of us who knew and liked him didn't agree
with all he said, but he was certain to make one think.
These few words are offered in his memory.
On Abortion
“I became involved with the abortion issue because of my
interest in population, but soon learned not to link the two subjects
in talking or writing, and to never try to tackle more than one taboo
at a time. The day after my first major talk on abortion in 1963, I got
a phone call from a woman wanting an abortion. From that point on until
California liberalized its abortion laws in 1970, my wife and I became
part of a network finding safe abortions for women in Mexico. We
didn't send them to anyone in this country, because we knew that
sooner or later a police “plant” would nail us. We kept
tabs on who the good providers were, and removed some if there were
problems. We did check out Japan and Sweden, where abortion was legal,
but they were too expensive and paternalistic there.
“We're now paying for the sins of the biology
professors—we should have long ago gotten across the notions of
embryology and the basic bioeconomics of human development, and the
fact that the earliest stages of human life from a strictly embryonic
point of view are worth practically nothing. In my opinion and in that
of most biologists, early abortion has almost no ethical
implications—all this fuss about this ‘terrible moral
problem’ is a bunch of nonsense. In all animals there is a
tremendous loss of life at the earliest stages and it doesn't
matter. All animals are capable of or even prone to reproducing far
beyond their ability to take care of the products of conception. If you
can't take care of them, and some are going to die, the earlier
the better.
“Western religious literature is almost silent on abortion.
People who say it is against the laws of religion are simply wrong.
There's nothing in the original literature that amounts to a hill
of beans on abortion. It's all been ‘faked up’ in
recent decades. And until about 1870, abortion was of no concern to
ethicists or doctors, but was performed by midwives and men had nothing
to do with it.”
On Population
“There is no way to write a code of ethics for the individual
that will solve the population problem, because population is a problem
for groups and has to be solved by community ethics—and that is
something utterly different. What is required is mutual coercion,
mutually agreed on. I think many people see this intuitively or
subconsciously but immediately react against it because they don't
like the idea of losing individual rights in the interest of the
greater community. Frequently that rejection takes the form of denying
that any problem exists at all. Also, whenever somebody does try to
address the problem in a practical manner, you hear all kinds of
accusations of Nazism, genocide, and the like. So the best way to
approach the issue may be with policies that make no overt reference to
population, such as restrictions on housing or marriages. Such policies
are not new, and it's been shown they can be effective.
“There's this lovely view that there is no such thing as
overpopulation, that it's all a matter of distribution of
resources. But what makes people assume that distribution is going to
become more favorable? And from the broadest point of view, would we
want it to? Do we want many more people using resources at the levels
the affluent do? We're all going to have to cut back as it is. We
have to talk about the ‘cultural carrying capacity’ of each
nation. Some people will be genuinely more happy with less consumption,
but many will not. It's a question of values, and those are not
easily changed.”
On Foreign Aid and Development
“Our whole concept of aid is based on the theory of the
‘demographic transition,’ which says that if we feed people
and make them more affluent, they will stop having so many babies. But
by 1975, the leading figures in demography had already
concluded it was all poppycock. Studies show that what occurred in
Europe has not been duplicated elsewhere and that if you increase
nutritional status you tend to increase fertility. But the theory lives
on among other people because it's what they want to believe, and
implies we won't have to really confront population problems, as
the demographic transition will supposedly take care of it. It also
serves the needs of anyone who wants to shake money out of people to
feed the starving and so forth. It amounts to a superstition that is
one of the most dreadful obstacles we have to face.
“We have to respect the sovereignty of nations, to tell them
that ‘We're not going to solve your population problems, you
have to do it.’ Only nations that have decided to be self-reliant
in this regard have accomplished anything. Even if they do decide to
use what we call draconian measures to cut fertility, the outside world
should applaud them for trying. We have no business telling them what
to do—except if we could attach ‘strings’ to our aid,
specifying that population must be addressed. But such proposals have
never gotten out of committees in Congress.”
On Immigration
“We're caught in a trap laid by our own heritage and that
terrible poem on the Statue of Liberty. How many people should we let
in? I don't have the answer, but our quotas now are too high and
too elastic. Again, we can't let other nations try to solve their
problems by expecting us to take the overflow. Often it takes some
unforeseen disaster for people to see this. If there's enough
trouble—and on the U.S.-Mexico border there is trouble, most of
which does not make it into the newspapers—people will start to
say ‘enough.’ There are ways to deal with the problem.
Tremendous disruption in Mexico might trigger such thoughts, but
politicians cannot even mention such things now.”
On Pollution
“Human error is probably our biggest risk. For example, the
Exxon Valdez fiasco was so predictable, but all the warnings were
dismissed by ‘practical’ people. We were afraid it might be
the Alaskan pipeline that caused a spill, but it turned out the problem
was just somewhere else along the chain. Economists still treat these
mishaps as ‘external’ costs, but they're only external
to the accounting books of the polluting firms. There is really no such
thing as an external effect. What we're ultimately talking about
are limited absorptive resources for the wastes of humans.”
On Nuclear Energy
“Chernobyl was right in line with my contention that it is the
human factor we have to worry about, not the technological issues. The
paradox is that, the safer you make the technical systems, the duller
the jobs are for those who work there, and it's harder to get
intelligent people to take those jobs. Then one day a problem strikes,
and they don't know what to do. Even the high-school dropouts are
too intelligent for the drudgery of the power plant jobs, so they get
bored and drink, take drugs, or fall asleep on the job.”
On Modern Agriculture
“Much of modern agriculture is a mistake. The only reason
we've gotten away with it for so long is that the damage it does
is so slight each year that we hardly notice. But finally we have to
pay the cost when we've lost our topsoil. And with insecticides
it's even worse. You see, ecologists have essentially a
conservative attitude, and you can see it perhaps best in traditional
farmers. People come in and tell them there are ‘better’
ways to do things, but the farmers resist. And in many cases it turns
out they were right to resist.”
On Wilderness
“National parks such as Yosemite should only be accessible to
people under their own power. If you're going to make the
wilderness accessible to people like me [Hardin lost the use of
his legs to childhood polio and relied on crutches], you'll
ruin it for everyone. So, as much I would like to experience
wilderness, I know I cannot. Even as it is, things are too crowded, so
we'll have to ration access in some way, whether by auction,
waiting lines, or lottery. If you do not do something that keeps the
numbers of people down to an agreed-on number that preserves the
quality of the wilderness, you ruin it for everyone.”
On Climate Change
“All of these issues are so closely related to growing
population. There's no doubt that we should be doing all we can to
remedy these problems—while we try to get a handle on the
population pressures that contribute to them all.”
On “Ecoterrorism” or
“Monkey-Wrenching”
I disapprove of frank outlawry. If I were approving of that, I
don't see how I could continue to disapprove of people who
blockade or bomb abortion clinics—they're both doing
something they feel so strongly about that they'll disobey any
laws. And if people in Greenpeace or Earth First! get hurt or killed
doing these things, they should know what they were getting into. Now,
if that leads to outlawing fishing on the high seas or clearcutting, it
may have achieved their aim. I just don't have much sympathy with
martyrs.”
On “Deep Ecology”
“I don't know what that is. I think some people are using
a lot of fancy rhetoric to put a gloss on the issues. This could do
more harm than good. I think deep ecology attracts some deep
nuts.”
On the Future
“Even though my own thinking has led to a lot of pessimistic
conclusions, I think I must have some kind of optimistic hormones. For
people deciding whether to procreate today, I think as things now stand
you just have to make that decision on a personal basis. There are so
many unknowns. Some people will be happy under virtually any
circumstances. Could you raise a child to be happy in a crumbling
world? Could you give that child values so they could live amidst
disaster and still be fulfilled?
“In trying to save something for posterity, we can't be so
exhaustive in our consumption and treatment of what we have in the
present. Our whole economic system discounts the future. But the future
will arrive.”
