The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons

Rereading the original paper I can't find anything objectionable. It's still insightful, applicable, and worthy of being a classic piece of scholarship. Maybe the man was racist but there's nothing overtly racist about the article itself unless one willfully infers intent based on words like "breeding". Problem being, nothing in the paper suggests that he didn't mean it to also apply to whites or to his own nation; rather, the obvious reading is that it applies universally, subject only to the institution of his recommended mitigations--education, property rights, legal and administrative prohibitions, etc.

What the paper gets wrong, if anything, is that populations can and do stabilize--even begin to shrink--much earlier than ever anticipated. More importantly, this occurs not in the face of disease or hardship but seemingly paradoxically because of wealth and selfishness. But that was never self-evident judging by how universally unchecked population explosion was assumed back then and how difficult the reality remains for people to appreciate even today. We only understood this after it had already come to pass in nations like Japan, and in general scholarship only relatively recently has it become presumed as a possible and natural outcome in the due course of industrialization.

This also wouldn't be the first time that a scholar put forth a remarkably simple and accurate statement of natural dynamics and then subsequently failed to apply their own argument with sufficient rigor and restraint, resulting in suspect secondary conclusions.

Since the Tragedy of the Commons is mathematically sound game theory (it essentially is a multiplayer generalization of the Prisoner's Dilemma) any critique really has to challenge the relevance of game theory to the real world, which is something of an uphill slog, even given the known problems with rational choice theory.

EDIT: And the extent to which the modern environmental movement relies on it is nothing to do with the details of the motivating example, it's entirely at the level of the broad game theory and desire to interpose an regulatory force to rearrange the incentives by internalizing externalities so that the payoff matrix for individuals no longer promotes universal defection, enabling the more optimal outcome to be acheived.

FWIW, here's the version I just read: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243