And its still happening to this day.
I was staying in a tribe village in Thailand, a full day trek into jungle. They had a dirt road connecting them to the rest of thailand but were surrounded by jungle. I was sharing few drinks with people i traveled and locals, and there was small commotion. When asking about it, locals explained that someone saw monkey out in the jungle and people were discussing who should shoot it.
They explained that there is no animals in over 5km around the village as its hunted for the meat the moment its spotted. Basically a deadzone for anything that has enough meat to be worth a shotgun shell.
Its clear as day that everyone in the village would benefit from cooperation but they dont. Humans on average are not rational. And we are barely more advanced than the ancient people. We have better tech, and a bit more empathy. But the wiring is still the same.
More to the point, the word "tragedy" in context isn't saying that the end result is neccesarily a tragedy for the people involved. The "tragedy" is our (alleged) inability to have nice shared stable resources, not any specific outcome of any specific resource being exhausted.
Ones that scale to more than a million people?
Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke.
Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas.
Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash.
I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.
> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it
So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".
It also says:
> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing
... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:
The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.
... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.
Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L...
I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with.
The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.
How? The source wiki now cites for that claim contradicts it. It says lords owned/managed it but not really - they weren't able to control access or put anything on it (manage it), and none of the commoners were able to manage it either because none of them owned it. How do you think "scale of access" was restricted without basics like fences? Cows don't care about laws.
The point of the tragedy of the commons is that without private property rights, resources get wasted and misused. The common land in mediaeval England is described in the book abstract as having that exact problem - it's either overgrazed and destroyed, or abandoned entirely. The solution was Enclosure, i.e. restoring ownership and building fences around the common areas, which is exactly the solution you'd need to utilize land effectively and prevent overgrazing.
> It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.
That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the commons. And of course privatization can be done in a fair or an unfair way. Just like every other potential solution.
I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.
Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons. And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.
What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.
> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit
There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.
In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.
Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.
With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.
We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.
Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.
Private logging operations have started taking a more sustainable view only after a lot of pressure from conservationist groups. And even today, private logging operations are destroying incredibly important forests. Private logging is a good example of why privatisation is so extremely bad about the commons and the environment.
> communication, monitoring and enforcement. > Which is a roundabout way of saying government. Privatised, for profit ownership encourages unsustainable exploitation, without much regard for the longer term consequences. Again - forestry is a good example, and so are fisheries. Likewise:
> Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
Again is a roundabout way of saying government. And instead of adding for-profit middle-men here, we can just skip that part and just govern the resources. Then you don't need to deal with a fiddly system of incentives, that will most likely be made weaker by lobbyists representing private interests.
> Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get a fair share. That however is a different question.
Intimately connected to the topic however, since historically, privatisation has always been used in order to enrich the already wealthy. So it is important, because this is the cause for privatisation, and therefore there will be a lot of propaganda and justification on why it needs to happen - which is what we see historically as well.