First-generation continuity: Garret Hardin

Garret Hardin was a biologist and environmentalist; a Malthusian and eugenicist. Denizen of the first generation of environmental Malthusians. Much has been made of Hardin’s well-known Tragedy of the commons thought experiment (1968)—a piece both famous and infamous in equal measure; proven and disproven ad infinitum (for various analyses, see Dahlman, 1991; Ostrom et al., 2002)—but chiefly, Hardin had intended it to be a clarion call to population control. The purpose of Hardin’s tragedy was to demonstrate the logical incompatibility between individual freedom and environmental limits. It was a variation on the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’: if individuals cooperated with one another they could guarantee a shared benefit for all, but if each individual pursued their own course, they stood to win a greater share for themselves—to the detriment of everyone else. Hardin used the metaphor of cattle grazing a shared field: if the farmer grazed an extra cow, he would receive a greater income, but if all of the farmers followed suit, the field

would become over-grazed and everyone would lose out, but in the absence of controls or incentives to counteract, the farmers would still choose to over-graze—such was the perverse incentive of the prisoner’s dilemma. For Hardin, the practical upshot of this was that self-interest outweighed community spirit, and as such, a finite environment would always be a space for competition rather than cooperation.

The facticity of Hardin’s account in real-world settings has been thoroughly critiqued, complicated, and in some respects debunked (notably by Ostrom, 1990), but there is still value in using Hardin’s discursive practice as a means to understand the construction of environmental Malthusianism. Hardin was not merely making an economic calculation between the availability of resources and the number of consumers. Hardin’s world-view was derived from his own discipline of biology—or at least the version of biology that dominated the first half of the 20th century—and his eugenic politics were rooted in this same science (Chase, 1975, engages in a lengthy tirade against Hardin, accusing him of scientific racism, and dissecting his biology textbook over two editions, highlighting Hardin’s steadfast refusal to give up his eugenicism, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary). Hardin’s eugenic politics percolated through the rest of his thought. He viewed the human species as a biologically predetermined hierarchy, established not by historical violence or unearned privilege, but by genetic heritage, which separated the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘subnormal’ from their biological superiors (1949, ch. XL; 1952, ch. 38). This biological-hierarchical view of human society bled into Hardin’s environmental Malthusianism. In terms of taking responsibility for population numbers, Hardin’s feeble-minded and subnormal cohort could not be trusted to do the right thing, so must be forcibly sterilised to prevent pollution of both the gene pool and the planet (ibid.).

Hardin’s biological elitism extended to his reasoning on so-called ‘lifeboat ethics’ (1974). Imagining rich countries as lifeboats, and poor countries as drowning people, Hardin invites us to consider the consequences of foreign aid. With limited space and resources, any attempt to bring everyone aboard the lifeboats would result in the suffering, starvation, or capsizing of all. Only a policy of non-admittance would keep the lifeboats afloat. Hardin’s over-riding elitism prevented him from integrating the obvious point that it is the rich countries—the lifeboats—who are the cause of the environmental problem, and so killing off the poor would not constitute a solution. Instead we are left to infer that, in the absence of the drowning masses, the rich world would have the breathing space

and cumulative intellect to bring about solutions at a later date, unhindered by the demands of developing populations.

Hardin’s biological world-view also extends to the innate desires of women, leading him to build an argument for state sanctioned population control on the basis that “women want more children than the community needs” (1970, p. 427; repeated in 1993, p. 258), and therefore cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions about reproduction. Hardin argued that the state should have the right to intervene, either through incentive or coercion, if it deems a woman to be at risk of having too many children. In each of these examples, Hardin constructs an argument predicated upon a biological view of the human species, with hierarchy intrinsic to it, causing his logical deductions and political musings to exhibit an unmistakable biological elitism.

I raise these points only to show the effects that a biologically elitist world-view has on the problematisation of population through the lens of environmentalism. As we shall see in the example of Paul and Anne Ehrlich, these conclusions are not inevitable, and a radically different outcome can derive from a biologically universalist starting point. Hardin is only one example of many, and I focus on his work merely as being representative of how the discourse functions (see Greene, 1999; Robertson, 2012 for a long list of others, as well as Chase, 1975 for a polemical treatment). To avoid any inference of an ad hominem sleight against Hardin, it is worth pointing out that, in the last edition of his biology textbook (Hardin and Bajema, 1978), he removed most traces of eugenic politics, focussing instead on the biology of heredity in all species, and changed the subtitle from ‘human implications’ to ’principles and implications’—shedding its manifestly political connotations. Furthermore, in one of his last books, Living within limits (1993), Hardin also expunged most elements of biological elitism, while still presenting a forceful argument for population control. Whether these examples represent a change of belief on Hardin’s part, or just the commercial imperatives of publishing in a new context, we cannot tell from the text alone. Either way, Hardin’s discursive practice tracks the fall of eugenic politics and the subjugation of biological elitism into the 1970s, and marks the rise of the second-generation of environmental Malthusianism. It is the journey of the discourse—not Hardin himself—that is of note to this analysis.