Earth in Common

Reviving the Commons and Moving Beyond the Myth of Inevitable Ruin

For most of human history, survival depended not on ownership but on relationship. Water was drawn from shared wells. Forests were tended collectively. Fisheries were governed by seasons, customs, and restraint. Pastures were grazed according to norms that balanced use with renewal. These shared systems on which we all rely, what we call the commons, were not ownerless, chaotic spaces. They were carefully managed living agreements between people and the land, shaped by necessity, memory, and mutual dependence.

A commons is not simply a resource. It is a relationship. It exists wherever communities recognize that certain things—like air, water, soil, forests, seeds, and knowledge—are essential to life itself and therefore cannot be reduced to commodities without consequence. Commons matter because they sustain the conditions that make all other economic activity possible. No market can function without breathable air. No civilization can endure without fertile soil or a stable climate. Commons are the quiet infrastructure of life.

In the past, commons took many forms. In medieval Europe, villagers held rights to graze animals, gather firewood, and cultivate strips of land within open-field systems. Indigenous societies across the world governed watersheds, forests, and hunting grounds through deeply embedded cultural laws. These systems were not perfect, but they were adaptive, place-based, and oriented toward continuity rather than extraction. Crucially, they were rooted in the understanding that humans were participants in nature, not masters standing apart from it.

Today, that understanding is reemerging through science rather than tradition. Ecology, earth system science, and the growing awareness of biosphere interdependence have revealed something ancient cultures long knew: the earth functions as one integrated system. Forests regulate rainfall thousands of miles away. Phytoplankton produce much of the oxygen we breathe (roughly half of all earth’s oxygen). Soil microbes influence the climate in miraculous ways. Human economies, and human survival, are not external to these systems; they are embedded within them.

A simple definition of the commons is land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community. Whether we like it or not, the earth already operates as a commons through marvelous interactions, including the examples already given, which bind humanity to the larger forces of life. The only question is whether we acknowledge this reality or continue to act as though we are exempt from it.

Somewhere along the way, we began to dismantle the shared foundations of life. Beginning in earnest with the enclosure movements in Europe, we took lands that had been held collectively for centuries and fenced, privatized, and transformed them into sources of rent and profit. The commons, once governed by custom and mutual obligation, were redefined as inefficient, backward, and wasteful. “Property,” reformers argued, would bring order. Markets would bring productivity. Privatization would bring progress.

The justifications were moral as much as economic. Enclosure advocates claimed that common land encouraged laziness and overuse. They claimed that without private ownership, people would take as much as they could, leaving nothing behind. They portrayed the commons as degraded by mismanagement and neglect, asserting that shared access invited abuse rather than care. Only by fencing, privatizing, and developing the land, they argued, could it be properly stewarded and aligned with the broader interests of productivity, economic progress, and social order. This argument was given further cover by philosophical thinkers, including John Locke, who in 1689 published his Second Treatise of Government, in which he argued that “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it).” This argument framed improvement through labor as the moral basis of ownership and helped legitimize the enclosure of common lands as both natural and socially beneficial.

This logic hardened into what later became known as the “tragedy of the commons.” In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the idea its modern formulation in an article published in Science magazine, describing a hypothetical pasture open to all, where each herder, acting in rational self-interest, adds more animals until the land is destroyed. Hardin’s conclusion was stark: “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. 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. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Only privatization or top-down control, he argued, could prevent collapse.

What Hardin presented as ecological law was, in fact, an assumption about human nature. His model imagined individuals stripped of culture, communication, memory, and responsibility—individuals without rules, norms, or shared values. It bore little resemblance to how real commons had ever functioned. Yet the simplicity of the story made it powerful. It was easily taught, easily repeated, and deeply compatible with an economic system already inclined toward enclosure. This same thinking led Hardin to commit suicide and espouse nativist views while promoting coercive constraints on reproduction to limit the growth of humanity and prevent overpopulation, which he viewed as the root cause of every ecological problem.

The tragedy of the commons was weaponized to justify the fencing of fields, the commodification of water, the patenting of seeds, and the extraction of minerals, forests, and fossil fuels. It echoed earlier rationales used during colonial expansion, when Indigenous lands were declared empty, unused, and wasted because they did not conform to European notions of property. The same logic underpinned the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny: land was valuable only when subordinated to profit, and ecosystems mattered only insofar as they could be converted into wealth. That the lands were governed by rights of occupancy and not fully cultivated or owned by Christians justified subordination and colonization.

After centuries of enclosure and privatization, we are now living with the results. The experiment has been run at planetary scale, and the outcomes are increasingly undeniable. Inequality has reached historic extremes, with wealth concentrated in the hands of those who control land, capital, and resources. The biosphere itself is approaching collapse, with global wildlife populations declining on average by 73% since 1970. Humanity has pushed beyond seven of nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for life. Half of the world’s coral reefs are now dead, marking the passage of earth’s first environmental tipping point, while populations of sharks and rays have plummeted 71% over fifty years. A third of earth’s forests have been erased, mainly replaced by agricultural monocultures more akin to deserts than working ecosystems.

Remember, the narrative and outcomes of the tragedy of the commons were meant to prevent environmental ruin. Where is the evidence that privatization succeeded? The greatest ecological destruction in history has occurred not in shared systems, but under regimes of extraction driven by profit, shielded by legal ownership, and insulated from responsibility through externalization of harm. What we are witnessing today is not the tragedy of the commons; it is the tragedy of enclosure.

Long before these consequences became so visible, one political economist chose to question the foundational myth itself. Elinor Ostrom did not accept Hardin’s parable as destiny. Instead, she asked a simple but radical question: how do people actually manage shared resources in the real world?

Ostrom devoted her career to studying fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and grazing lands managed by communities worldwide. She chose these cases precisely because they were supposed to fail. According to the prevailing theory, these community-managed systems should have collapsed under the weight of self-interest. Instead, Ostrom found something remarkable. Many commons had been sustainably managed for centuries, sometimes millennia, without privatization or centralized control.

Far from the portrayal of the commons as a Wild West governed by self-interest and lawlessness, she found successful commons distinguished by the presence of rules. Communities developed clear boundaries, shared norms, systems of monitoring, graduated sanctions, and mechanisms for resolving conflict. Resource users were not faceless competitors; they were neighbors with reputations, histories, and futures intertwined with the health of the system itself. Rather than being driven solely by short-term gain, people acted as stewards because their survival and identity depended on it.

Ostrom’s work dismantled the inevitability at the heart of the tragedy narrative. Overuse was not a law of nature; it was a failure of governance. When communities had the right to organize, participate in rule-making, and adapt those rules to local conditions, commons often outperformed both private markets and state control.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for this work, becoming the first woman to win that prize. Yet despite this recognition, her findings remain far less widely known than Hardin’s bleak parable. The idea that humans are incapable of cooperation continues to dominate the societal imagination, even as contradicting evidence mounts.

We have allowed the experiment of enclosure to continue long past the point where its damage became clear. We have mistaken extraction for efficiency, growth for progress, and ownership for care. Today’s tragedy of the commons is not caused by shared use, but by unfettered capitalism and systems that reward those who profit from depletion while distributing the costs across society, future generations, and the living world itself.

What we need now is not nostalgia, but a shift in mindset. To see ourselves as participants in a living system capable of repair, rather than parasites on the planet. To recognize that potential stewardship through shared cooperation is not naïve—it is a critical necessity. Ostrom showed us that cooperation is not an anomaly; it is a latent capacity waiting to be cultivated. She showed that resources held in common can be and often are properly stewarded. We just have to first recognize that we are all tied to their well-being and operate as such.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are bound to one another through air, water, soil, and climate. The biosphere, that thin layer surrounding this precious blue planet where all life lives, connects us all to the commons. We must choose whether to align ourselves with it consciously, drawing on the best of human cooperation, or allow the myth of inevitable overexploitation to continue guiding us toward collapse. Life on earth depends on that choice.

Elinor Ostrom’s Eight Principles for Governing the Commons

1. Clearly defined boundaries
   Communities must know who has rights to use a resource and where those boundaries lie.

2. Rules adapted to local conditions
   Use and stewardship rules should reflect local ecological and cultural realities, not one-size-fits-all solutions.

3. Collective decision-making
   Those affected by the rules should have a meaningful role in shaping and modifying them.

4. Monitoring
   Resource conditions and user behavior are monitored by accountable members of the community.

5. Graduated sanctions
   Violations are met with proportionate, escalating responses rather than immediate punishment.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms
   Accessible, low-cost ways to resolve disputes prevent breakdowns in trust.

7. Recognition of the right to self-organize
   External authorities must respect the community’s right to govern its own commons.

8. Nested enterprises (for large systems)
   When commons span large scales, governance should be organized across interconnected layers.

This article is the first in a series that will examine how the commons have been enclosed and the impacts of that enclosure, as well as how they have been successfully stewarded when communities follow Ostrom’s principles for governing shared resources. The series will explore examples where the so-called tragedy of the commons unfolded and what went wrong, alongside cases where stewardship thrived. It will also look forward to the possibility of a world in which we reclaim our role as responsible stewards of life on earth. Through these examples, I hope to highlight ways we might align ourselves with the living world and open ourselves to greater cooperation and care for the commons, of which we are all a part.