The problems we face today could fall squarely within the
realms the public “commons”, or tragedies of the commons as economists put it —
from biogenetics to forests to pseudo-apartheid, we are struggling with topics
we took for granted as owned by all (who owns the sun, or the human DNA, for
example?), and will only proliferate this century.
اضافة اعلان
As global capitalism is no longer in need of democracy, we
increasingly see governments, and individuals, that are happy to ignore
traditions, respect for human rights, diplomatic agreements, and even common
courtesy in favor of personal interest, and there is very little that actually
regulates the common spaces — the rise of neo-nationalism across the world is a
good example of that.
For example, despite all of the doomsday predictions fueled
by panic over production, the scarcity of natural resources has been decreasing
rather than increasing. Between the exploration of new technology, finding
substitutes to fueling cars and cooking stoves with electricity and renewable
energy, and improving the efficiency of everyday items and recycling, for the
large part either demand decreased, substitutes were created, or reserves have
increased.
The irony, of course, is that some of the renewable natural
resources, including many fisheries or forests, have completely disappeared —
events that seemed unimaginable before, like bees becoming extinct, are a
reality today.
The key differences being, among other reasons, property
regimes. While nobody owns the fish in the sea, oil is governed by
well-defined, relatively easily enforceable rights of ownership and are often
regulated, to some extent, by what is dubbed as scarcity rent, where the price
of a good in short supply increases because of its limited supply, while such
rents are dissipated with public commons.
This is not to suggest that all renewable sources should be
privatized to be controlled. What we need is to reinvent how we think about
these topics and find solutions at a global scale.
Sadly, what is happening today at a systems level is almost
turning the tables on individuals: Did you recycle your trash? Are you using
less plastic? Have you turned the lights off in your house? Are you driving a
hybrid car? and so on. Even when the evidence clearly exist that — at an
individual level — our use of plastic, for example, is not what is causing the
environmental catastrophe, but that large-scale production and mishandling
could be.
We need new solutions that are enforceable at a global
level, as very soon we may need to answer the question of how to regulate human
consciousness planted into a machine; there is no template for that.
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