A tragedy of the commons31/5/2020 Season 1. Episode 1.
As of the writing of this piece, the current worldwide tally for those affected by the Corona virus stands at approximately 6 million people. I can only assume that this number will, unfortunately, still increase as more and more people are found to be infected by this virus every day. Of the ones infected, approximately one third have recovered so far, with the current death toll standing at approximately 3 hundred and 69 thousand. These figures are from the Worldometers website for the Corona virus.
Based on the narrative on television and social media, we know that this virus started in China. The country has admitted as much, although with much reluctance. The world watched with bated breath as the inevitable happened, and the virus spread throughout the world, infecting millions. It was never a question of ‘if’, but of ‘when’. And of course, we are all aware of the current debate surrounding the fact whether the existence of the virus and the disease were deliberately hidden from the rest of the world by China. Be as it may, the point that I want to discuss is not political. It’s social.
As per Wikipedia, ‘The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action. The theory originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland’.
For those who may not have heard of this theory, allow me to illustrate the point with an example. Say, there is an acre of land, on which 5 cattle herders are allowed to graze their cows, with the upper limit being set to 5 cows per herder. This arrangement would have allowed enough time for the grass on the land to grow back, so that there is enough for the 25 cows. Now say 1 of the cattle herders decides that he can make more money than the others, by the way of milk production, by grazing 7 cows instead of 5. When he does that, the additional grazing by the 2 extra cows leaves less time for the grass on the land to grow. Now say the rest of the herders also get the same idea, and in an effort to earn more money, they all graze more than the allowed number. The result would be overgrazing, leading to no grass being left on that piece of land for anybody at all. Now although this theory goes further into population control, or lack thereof, and resource management in general, I think this goes to reflect quite accurately how a person, and by extension, a group, a society, thinks and processes information. Life by default is very single-minded. When you strip away all the noise that is human culture, society, and progress, the only purpose of life, is to create more life. Anyone even remotely unconvinced of that fact just needs to look around at the part of the world that is not ‘human’. They would immediately realise that this sense of ‘higher purpose’ that we humans possess, is not shared by the rest of life on this planet. Their sole purpose is to make sure that their kind does not die out. Literally anything and everything that any other living organism on this planet does is geared towards that one sole purpose. Us humans? Not so much. If I were to sum up the purpose of human existence, as determined by us, in one word, that word would be ‘legacy’. We have always done and wanted to do things that leave behind a legacy. Be it our name, our children, our achievements or our kind. We know that life ends, and we have always wanted a way to beat that. If not in body, then at least in spirit. And in the pursuit of this goal, mankind has come leaps and bounds ahead of the other inhabitants of this fragile world. While on the surface this seems completely fine, and dare I say, noble, the problem lies in the way we have chosen to advance our society. The way I see it, the problem yet again, can be summed up in one, single word. ‘More’. We as a people seem to have decided that the only way we can exist on this planet, and be happy with our way of life, is simply by having more and more of everything. That is literally the only yardstick that we as societies have developed to measure how much better we are than the others. The ‘more’ you have, can produce, can consume, the better off you are from the rest. And although this mind set has indeed given us a lot of the things that we have and enjoy today, a better quality of life being the most noticeable, it has also brought us dangerously close to completely destroying the very home that we live it. As postulated in ‘The theory of the commons’, in an effort to maximize the returns from our efforts and investment, we seem to have forgotten that the world is in fact not an unlimited to source of resources that we can derive and extract from. To be better than other people, we feel the need to have better things. The latest iPhone, the latest fashionable clothes. To be better than other families, we need to have bigger houses, better amenities. To be better than other cities, we need to have the tallest buildings. To be better than other countries, we need to have the largest economies. And in a bid to constantly outdo, outbuild, outconsume and outperform the others, we encroach and destroy the homes and lives of the other inhabitants of this planet, who sadly have no say in their own future. We destroy their habitats, farm them in larger quantities to consume them, hunt them to the brink of extinction. It is quite evident that this formula of putting our interests first with regards to everything, hasn’t worked out quite so well for us in the long run. It seems it would be in our own interest to heed the warnings nature is sending our way, and rather quickly. Throughout history, the human life has been scattered with achievements of varying degrees, whether it is the advent of farming, the domestication of livestock, the invention of the steam engine, or the binary world of computers. We have come so far from living in caves and not knowing when and if we have another meal, that we have seemingly forgotten that we are just a small part of a vast design. Our pursuit of the next big thing at the cost of whatever it takes has left behind a path of destruction and despair, tipping the scales of nature’s delicate balance that it took millennia to perfect. The home that we all inhabit has only so much that it can give us, and yet we consume everything within eyesight as if the world is an endless source of sustenance. The Corona virus pandemic is just a symptom of a larger problem. If anything good ever comes out of all this, I hope it the fact that we all take a long hard look at how we have consumed and destroyed the world around us, and hopefully, come up with a way to rectify that. The bigger challenge I think, is that we collectively need to abandon our illusion of superiority over other beings. Everything we see around us has a part to play in this complex jigsaw puzzle that is our planet and it is obvious that we must completely reset our way of thinking and approaching the problems that we have created, to ever have any hopes of a long term and sustainable solution. It is as the great scientist Albert Einstein rightly said, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them’. As the only species on this planet who now has the ability to chart the future course for all life on it, we must not forget; we are all cattle herders, if we do not change our ways soon, there will be no more grass growing on our piece of land. -- The End --
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