The original text of this column in The Daily Maverick.
In 1968, the biologist Garret Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons”, a paper which argued for some unfortunate implications of the unrestricted exploitation of common resources. The primary example used by Hardin is a communal grazing pasture for cattle, where common use presents no problem until the maximum capacity of the pasture has been reached. After this point, overgrazing leads to the pasture becoming worthless to everyone, as it no longer has any capacity to provide food for the cattle. The problem, of course, is that each individual farmer is incentivised to maximise their own good. They therefore keep adding animals to the pasture, with little thought for the future, until the capacity is reached – thus ensuring the eventual destruction of the pasture.