
A flawed metaphor by a racist ecologist defined environmental thinking - BerislavLopac
https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657
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AllegedAlec
Twitter rants are basically unreadable to me. I don't understand why people
don't just link to a normal blogging place if they're going to blog.

I don't see what's wrong with Hardin's model. The metaphor behind it may be
wonkey, I wouldn't know, I haven't looked into it, but the math works out.

Furthermore, I don't really know why his views matter so much here.

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HillRat
I think there are some practical consequences to his line of thought that bear
scrutiny. For Hardin, the base consumptive unit is racial or national; the
world can be understood as races (and, within races, differing social classes)
competing to devour scarce resources by outbreeding each other. In other
words, for Hardin the mathematical model is a springboard into a racial-
supremacist and social-Darwinian worldview.

Practically, this means that Hardin’s prescriptions tend towards what can be
called without irony “eco-fascism;” _of course_ we need government
intervention into “breeding,” to prevent the lower classes from breeding us
into imbicility! _Of course_ we need to be vigilant lest the
Muslims/Africans/Latinos outbreed us! Hardin’s worldview is a bleak,
intolerant vision of race wars over shrinking resource bases, eternally.

Contrast with a more (clasically) liberal view of the TotC as a market failure
based on insufficient information and incorrect pricing. In this view, the
problem is simply that the regulative norms of the market need to be adjusted
(through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, etc), and we can collaboratively (and
democratically) work to ensure ecological sustainability (I’ll leave aside
caveats regarding the current state of global and national political
polarization).

So, practically speaking, Hardin’s analysis needs to be heavily caveated at a
minimum, or exhaustively analyzed to better understand the political and
social dynamics of environmentalist theory and practice. Certainly, it helps
explain why, though environmentalists are not themselves attracted to fascism,
why some fascists are attracted to their own form of environmentalism.

~~~
AllegedAlec
Hardin's work didn't just influence race/class based policies though. It's the
(part of) reason we have stuff like fishing quota. Dismissing his entire work
because in a fraction of the use cases it could be used wrongly seems absurd
to me.

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jonathanyc
I think this weird Twitter rant throws into stark relief a difference between
the humanities and sciences.

A political scientist is claiming that the metaphor of the tragedy of the
commons isn’t useful because its creator was racist. It is certainly clear to
me now that Hardin was a racist and not a subtle one.

... but just because some guy on Twitter decided to go on a rant doesn’t
change the fact that the tragedy of the commons is a situation whose
preconditions, causes, and effects actual scientists have rigorously defined.

Just because the human ecologist who popularized it (and I love the irony of
the political scientist tweeter implying that his opinion is invalid because
he was _gasp_ actually just a human ecology professor) was a bad person
doesn’t change the state of science.

