“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” — Garrett Hardin
 

Exploring the magnificent natural areas we have to enjoy, I’m unfortunately sometimes assaulted by the aftermath of people “behaving badly." Trash, graffiti, damage, and destruction of plants are all too common. I struggle to understand the mindset of someone “behaving badly” (as I have defined it above) when for me, I am treading on hallowed ground and could not imagine despoiling it in any way.

Like me, I know most people were shocked at the behavior of people using our National Parks during the government shutdown a couple years ago when elected officials could not agree on a federal budget and all non-essential federal employees were put on leave — except they kept the National Parks’ gates open without staffing. Rather than take their trash home, visitors piled their personal refuse in bathrooms. Other people took their vehicles off-road and destroyed vegetation, others destroyed or defaced historic cultural sites. Who does that? What were they thinking? Who raised them to think that was ok behavior? As it turns out, others have contemplated this conundrum and have named it “the tragedy of the commons."

The tragedy of the commons applies to lands, water, open space, wildlife habitat, the ocean, etc. that are open for the collective public use, but when individual users, “acting according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good.” The result can be then be the depletion or spoiling of that shared resource. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used an example of the effects of unregulated grazing and the resulting degradation of common land (also known as a "common").  The concept was repackaged and given a modern context in an essay written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Hardin later admitted that he should have coined the phrase a bit differently, saying that it is the “tragedy of the unmanaged commons," as there are examples of “commons” that are valued and protected by (almost) all those who set foot within them (i.e., our State and National Parks – although for some apparently only as long as there are staff present). 

An example of this problem at a commercial, resource harvesting level is fishing in our oceans – the common use area available to anyone with a boat and the gear to catch fish. Commercial fishing yields vary greatly from season to season. Every fisherman has bills to pay and families to support and so typically uses a strategy to maximize their profit and so to maximize their daily catch when they can because of the unpredictability of each season, even if that means ultimately depleting the fishery so that everyone loses. Even with strict catch limits, the problem can continue with unpredictable good years followed be bad years when the fishermen can barely make a living, and many go bankrupt. Then, for at least some fisheries, economists tried changing the game. They proposed to divide up the fishing area into “parcels” that could be leased by the fishermen and within which the fishermen would have exclusive use. As long as they stayed within their parcel, the fishermen could catch as much as they wanted. Or they could manage their catch for long term sustainability. Once there was a perception of exclusive ownership and an understanding of what it would take to have a dependable catch year after year, the fishermen opted for long-term sustainability with it an overall increased health of the ocean ecosystem.

In the United States our National Parks protect extraordinary examples of a natural landscapes unchanged by people. Extraordinary, yes, but of course, the pristine part is not entirely true. There is not anywhere that the first wave of people immigrating into this hemisphere some 20,000 years ago (or more) did not live and, and like people anywhere, modify their world to the benefit of their survival. Of course, compared with our current cities, agriculture, and roadways, the footprint of those first immigrants was and is exceedingly low, without causing irreparable harm to the land and its biodiversity (although there is still debate as to whether it was the changing climate, or did those first people play a role in hastening the extinctions of North America’s Pleistocene megafauna as those people overlapped in time and space with mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, horses, and saber-toothed cats by some 5,000-10,000 years). In many other places, especially developing countries, there is no such perception for their National Parks as being pristine, rather their parks are often still “working landscapes” with low levels of livestock grazing and resource extraction to gather food, medicines, fuel, and building materials. Where the descendants of that first wave of immigrants into North America still lived within the boundaries of our proposed National Parks, they were escorted away, and their legacy then described as period long ago, rather than a current and on-going culture.

Years ago, my family and I visited Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa, as I was anxious to see chameleons in their natural habitat. We did see those amazing lizards, and while only a fraction of the chameleon species richness present there, we did see a dozen species, some ranging from barely an inch long and others, from the tip of their tail to the tip of their nose, well over two feet in length. Madagascar has many National Parks that protect chameleons and lemurs and birds and plants found nowhere else on this planet. As we hiked with our guides along forest trails through the parks, it was not uncommon to come across a local villager tending his cattle as they grazed along the trail. When I asked why this “intrusion” into this National Park was allowed, our guide had some trouble understanding why I would ask such a question. The village had this National Park placed on their lands, and despite whatever impacts they had, the area had been deemed suitable as a park. If it was deemed National Park quality before, what difference did it make if they continued to use it as they had for millennia? Plus, the villagers then protected the park from other sources of destruction, like poachers. They were right. The chameleons and lemurs and birds were all still there, oblivious to and unaffected by a few grazing cattle.

Again, years ago, I received a grant from UC MEXUS to foster collaborations between a group of Mexican fringe-toed lizard scientists and myself and Mark Fisher (biologist at the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Station). The funding included having the Mexican scientists visit us with reciprocal visits for Mark and I to visit their study areas. There are six species of fringe-toed lizards occurring on sand dunes in the deserts of southern California, southwest Arizona, and along the northern fringes of the Gulf of California in both Baja California and northwest Sonora, Mexico, all directly or indirectly associated with sands deposited from the Colorado River. Curiously, there are two additional species on the east side of the continental divide in the Chihuahua Desert of Mexico with no obvious connection to the Colorado River. It was those two species that Mark and I went to see, along with the scientists that study them. Both species have very small ranges, and one, Uma paraphygas, is protected within a National Park-like designation, the Mapimi Man and the Biosphere Reserve (it is a United Nations, UNESCO program, to protect imperiled areas world-wide). The Mapimi Reserve was not created (just) for the fringe-toed lizard, rather its focus was protecting the last remaining wild population of perhaps one of the most endangered tortoises on the planet, the Bolson tortoise, as well as some of the richest cactus species diversity on our planet. One of the big reasons that the tortoise is endangered was that people ate them.

Our host scientists easily showed us the lizards and, with a little more effort, the tortoise. But once again I was struck by the relative abundance of cattle tracks across the habitats on the Mapimi Reserve, and knowing that cattle and tortoises eat the same food, so potentially compete. Like in Madagascar, our hosts were surprised by my question. Cattle had grazed these lands for a few centuries, and the tortoise seemed to be ok. So why change what seemed to be working? Creating protected areas here in the U.S. was based on powerful laws, whereas in Mexico (and elsewhere) protection was based on an ongoing relationship with local landowners. Prior to its UNESCO designation, the Mapimi region was a series of cattle ranches, and yes, they occasionally ate tortoises. The folks who spearheaded the protection for the tortoise needed to convince each of those cattle ranchers that the UNESCO designation would not harm their ranches or the entire effort would collapse. All they needed to do was stop eating tortoises. There was and continues to be regular meetings around kitchen tables over coffee (or tequila), and it has worked. The cattle ranchers are now tortoise and lizard protectors. 

These examples present very different models for the protection of biodiversity than what we typically practice here in the U.S. Arguably one of those differences is the absence of a real or perceived sense of ownership by the part of at least those visitors to the National Parks during the federal government shutdown a couple years ago, and for all those people who leave their trash, tag rocks and signs with their graffiti, and destroy plants.  The result is the “tragedy of the commons."

  Remember Baba Dioum’s quote, "In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught."  It is so important that we naturalists are ambassadors for biodiversity, that like Dr. Seuss’ Lorax who “spoke for the trees," that we speak for nature writ large, and in doing so we give our listeners understanding, and then a sense of ownership for the well-being or our planet and all its inhabitants.

I’m including a photo a taken by one of our California Naturalists, Larry Heronema (CalNat 2018), while we and our community science team were surveying plants and lizards on the Bear Creek trail earlier this week.

Happy holidays to all!

Go outside, tip your hat to a lizard, and be safe.