tractors and trucks and air-conditioning, but also for fertilizers and herbicides.
Given these circumstances, most social and natural scientists concluded from
the 1973 energy crisis that we cannot blithely maintain our economic growth
forever. “Anyone having the slightest familiarity with the physics of heat,
energy, and matter,” wrote Mishan in 1977, “will realize that, in terms of
historical time, the end of economic growth, as we currently experience it,
cannot be that far off.”^24 This is largely because of the awesome power of
compound interest. Economic growth at 3 percent, a conventional standard,
means that the economy doubles every quarter-century, typically doubling
society’s use of raw materials, expenditures of energy, and generation of
waste.
The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 pointed to the difficulty that capitalism,
a marvelous system of production, was never designed to accommodate
shortage. For demand to exceed supply is supposed to be good for capitalism,
leading to increased production and often to lower costs. Oil, however, is not
really produced but extracted. In a way it is rationed by the oil companies and
OPEC from an unknown but finite pool. Thus, the oil companies, which we
habitually perceive as competing capitalist producers, might more accurately
be viewed as keepers of the commons.
America has seen commons problems before. Imagine a colonial New
England town in which each household kept a cow. Every morning, a family
member would take the cow to the common town pasture, where it would join
other cows and graze all day under the supervision of a cowherd paid by the
town. An affluent family might benefit from buying a second cow; any excess
milk and butter they could sell to cowless sailors and merchants. Expansion of
this sort could go on only for a finite period, however, before the common
pasture was hopelessly overgrazed. What was in the short-term interest of the
individual family was not in the long-term interest of the community. If we
compare contemporary oil companies with cow-holding colonial families, we
see that new forms of governmental regulations, analogous to the regulated use
of the commons, may be necessary to assure there will be a commons—in this
case, an oil pool—for our children.^25
The commons issue affects our society in other ways. Fishing and
shellfishing are in crisis. A catch of 20 million bushels of crabs and oysters in
Chesapeake Bay in 1892 and 3.5 million in 1982 fell to just 166,000 bushels in
- Fisherfolk responded the way people usually do when their standard of