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The Tragedy of Enclosure
The “Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the modern world’s most dangerous myths.
By George Monbiot.
Published in Scientific American (January 1994)
During the long dry seasons in the far north west of Kenya, the people of the Turkwel
River keep themselves alive by feeding their goats on the pods of the acacia trees
growing on its banks. Every clump of trees is controlled by a committee of elders,
who decide who should be allowed to use them and for how long.
Anyone coming into the area who wants to feed his goats on the pods has to negotiate
with the elders. Depending on the size of the pod crop, they will allow him in or tell
him to move on. If anyone overexploits the pods or tries to browse his animals
without negotiating with the elders first he will be driven off with sticks: if he does it
repeatedly he may be killed. The acacia woods are a common: a resource owned by
many families. Like all the commons of the Turkana people, they are controlled with
fierce determination.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Turkana were battered by a combination of drought and
raiding by enemy tribes, armed with automatic weapons. Many people came close to
starvation, and the Kenyan government, the United Nations Development Programme
and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization decided that something had to be
done to help them.
The authorities knew nothing of how the Turkana regulated access to their commons.
What they saw, in the acacia forests, and the grass and scrublands of the savannahs,
was a succession of unrelated people moving in, taking as much as they wanted, then
moving out again. If the Turkana tried to explain how it worked, their concepts were
lost in translation. It looked like a free-for-all, and the experts blamed the lack of
regulation for the disappearance of the vegetation. This was, in fact, caused not by
people but by drought.
They decided that the only way to stop the people from overusing their resources was
to settle them down, get rid of most of their animals and encourage them to farm. On
the banks of the Turkwel River they started a series of irrigation schemes, where exnomads
could own a patch of land and grow grain. They spent US$60,000 per hectare
in setting it up.
People flocked in, not, on the whole, to farm, but to trade, to find paid labour or to
seek protection from their enemies. With the first drought the irrigation scheme
collapsed. The immigrants reverted to the only certain means of keeping themselves
alive in the savannahs: herding animals. They spread along the banks, into the acacia
woods.
Overwhelmed by their numbers, the elders could do nothing to keep them away from
their trees. If they threatened to kill anyone for taking pods without permission, they
were reported to the police. The pods and the surrounding grazing were swiftly
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exhausted and people started to starve. The commons had become a free-for-all. The
authorities had achieved exactly what they set out to prevent.
The overriding of commoners’ rights has been taking place, often with similarly
disastrous consequences, for centuries, all around the world. But in the last three
decades it has greatly accelarated. The impetus for much of this change came from a
paper whose title has become a catchphrase among developers.
In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin, an American biologist, argued that
common property will always be destroyed, because the gain that individuals make by
over-exploiting it will outweigh the loss they suffer as a result of its over-exploitation.
He used the example of a herdsman, keeping his cattle on a common pasture. With
every cow the man added to his herds he would gain more than he lost: he would be
one cow richer, while the community as a whole would bear the cost of the extra cow.
He suggested that the way to prevent this tragedy from unfolding was to privatize or
nationalize common land.
The paper, published in Science magazine, had an enormous impact. It neatly
encapsulated a prevailing trend of thought, and appeared to provide some of the
answers to the growing problem of how to prevent starvation. For authorities such as
the World Bank and Western governments it provided a rational basis for the
widespread privatization of land. In Africa, among newly-independent governments
looking for dramatic change, it encouraged the massive transfer of land from tribal
peoples to the state or to individuals.
In Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, developers hurried to remove land from
commoners and give it to people they felt could manage it better. The commoners
were encouraged to work for those people as waged labour or to move to the towns,
where, in the developing world, they could become the workforce for the impending
industrial revolutions.
But Hardin’s paper had one critical flaw. He had assumed that individuals can be as
selfish as they like in a commons, because there is no one to stop them. In reality,
traditional commons are closely regulated by the people who live there. There are two
elements to common property: common and property. A common is the property of a
particular community which, like the Turkana of the Turkwel River, decides who is
allowed to use it and to what extent they are allowed to exploit it.
Hardin’s thesis works only where there is no ownership. The oceans, for example,
possessed by no one and poorly regulated, are over-fished and polluted, as every user
tries to get as much out of them as possible, and the costs of their exploitation are
bourne by the world as a whole. But these are not commons but free-for-alls. In a true
commons, everyone watches everyone else, for they know that anyone overexploiting
a resource is exploiting them.
The effects of dismantling the commons to prevent Hardin’s presumed tragedy of
over-exploitation from running its course can scarcely be overstated. In Brazil, for
example, peasant communities are being pushed off their land to make way for agroindustry.
Land that supported thousands of people becomes the exclusive property of
one family. Mechanisation means that hardly any permanent labour is needed.
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Some of the dispossessed go to the cities where, instead of an industrial revolution,
they find unemployment and destitution. Others go to the Amazon, where they may
try to move into the commons belonging to the Indians, defying their regulations by
cutting and burning the forests.
No group has suffered more than the people singled out by Hardin’s paper: the
traditional herders of animals, or pastoralists. In Kenya the Maasai have been cajoled
into privatizing their commons: in some parts every family now owns a small ranch.
Not only is this destroying Maasai society, as tight communities are artificially
divided into nuclear families, but it has undercut the very basis of their survival.
In the varied and changeable savannahs, the only way a herder can survive is by
moving. Traditionally the Maasai followed the rain across their lands, leaving an area
before its resources were exhausted and returning only when it had recovered. Now,
confined to a single plot, they have no alternative but to graze it until drought or
overuse brings the vegetation to an end. When their herds die, entrepreneurs move in,
buy up their lands for a song and either plough them for wheat and barley, exhausting
the soil within a few years, or use them as collateral for securing business loans.
In Somalia, Siad Barre’s government nationalized the commons, nullifying the laws
devised by Somali communities to protect their grazing lands from people of other
clans. When charcoal burners moved in to cut their trees, the local people found that
there was nothing they could do to stop them. The free-for-all with which the
commons regime was replaced was one of the reasons for the murderous chaos now
governing the country.
The enclosure of the commons, of which these are examples, has always been ruinous
for the commoners. In Britain we choose to remember what we consider the positive
effects of enclosure: the creation of a workforce to drive the Industrial Revolution.
But the expropriation of common land by private landlords took place in many cases
centuries before industrialization.
The dispossessed commoners became vagrants, hounded from county to county,
without licences permitting them to work, begging and stealing to get by, sometimes
expressing their fury by rioting or burning the new owners’ hayricks. It was only after
hundreds of years of proscription, destitution and starvation that jobs for the
dispossessed became widely available in the cities.
These changes in the ownership of land lie at the heart of our environmental crisis.
Traditional rural communities use their commons to supply most of their needs: food,
fuel, fabrics, medicine and housing. To keep themselves alive they have to maintain a
diversity of habitats: woods, grazing lands, fields, ponds, marshes and scrub. Within
these habitats they need to protect a wide range of species: different types of grazing,
a mixture of crops, trees for fruit, fibres, medicine or building.
The land is all they possess, so they have to look after it well. But when the commons
are privatized, they pass into the hands of people whose priority is to make money.
The most efficient means of making it is to select the most profitable product and
concentrate on producing that.
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So, in Kenya, the Maasai’s savannahs - a mixture of woods and scrub, grasslands and
flowering swards - are replaced with uniform fields of wheat. The crofts of Scotland,
whose forests, marshes, fields and pastures answered all the commoners’ needs, gave
way to sheep and pine plantations. As the land is no longer the sole means of survival,
but an investment that can be exchanged, the new owners can, if necessary, overexploit
it and reinvest elsewhere.
As land changes hands, so does power. When communities own the land they make
the laws, and develop them to suit their own needs. Everyone is responsible for
ensuring that everyone else obeys them. As landlords take over, it is their law that
prevails, whether or not it leads to the protection of local resources. Thus, when the
people living around Twyford Down try to prevent a road from destroying their
common, it is they who are arrested for impeding the bulldozers, rather than the
developers, who are committing, in commoners’ terms, an unspeakable crime.
The language in which the old laws were expressed gives way to the language of
outsiders. With it go many of the concepts and cautionary tales encouraging people to
protect their environment. Translated into the dominant language they appear
irrational and archaic. As they disappear, so does much that makes our contact with
the countryside meaningful: it becomes a series of unrelated resources, rather than an
ecosystem of which we, economically, culturally and spiritually, are a part. For
human beings, as for the biosphere, the tragedy of the commons is not the tragedy of
their existence but the tragedy of their disappearance.