northeast. A suffix ofdorforburgin a city place name often indicates settlement by
German immigrants. Studies of toponyms can uncover cultural relictboundaries
in the landscape, because the toponyms used by a people often persist on the land-
scape long after the group has disappeared or moved on, or new boundaries have
been formed. Of course, a toponym may provide descriptive information about
the physical characteristics of a place as well. The qualities of Death Valley,
California, and Pleasant Valley, Iowa, are reflected in their respective toponyms,
at least according to those who named them.
Tragedy of the Commons
This phrase is the title of an article by the biologist and social commentator Garrett
Hardin, first published in 1968. The article and the concepts regarding the conser-
vation of resources it presents are still widely debated by scholars in the social sci-
ences. The problem that Hardin describes, the proper management of resources
held in common, represents a dilemma that has been addressed by philosophers
and economists since ancient times. Hardin uses the metaphor of a “commons,”
a communal pasture, to illustrate how individual self-interest may be in conflict
with community interests when utilizing a common resource.
In Hardin’s example, a pasture is held in common by a group of farmers, where
each farmer is allowed to graze as many cows as he/she wishes. Because there is
no cost to any farmer to graze an animal, each will attempt to place the maximum
number of animals on the land to gain the greatest amount of “profit” in the form
of additional livestock. As each user adds additional cows, the quality of the pas-
ture steadily declines due to overgrazing, but because none of the farmers actually
owns the land, and there is no greater authority that can limit the pasture’s exploi-
tation, the land is degraded to the point that it can no longer support livestock. This
occurs because the users of the resource (the pasture) have no motivation to
conserve it, only to maximize their individual gain from it, and the damage from
placing additional cows on the land is shared with the other users. According to
Hardin, such abuse of a common property is in the rational economic interests of
each individual farmer, because the advantage each receives, even after the pasture
has been badly overgrazed, is still greater than any costs associated with using the
“commons.” The “tragedy” in Hardin’s title refers to his view that such behavior is
inevitable when humans attempt to utilize a “common” resource for which there
are no associated costs.
Hardin’s argument, in fact, is based on actual examples. The Boston Common,
a central pasture located in the heart of the city in the 1600s, was closed to public
Tragedy of the Commons 345