Tragedy Of The Commons Analysis

Garrett Hardin’s famous, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” has been effective till date. His modest but commanding explanation of herdsmen sharing a common pasture has created a debate in a wide range of topics as to how resources are being over used. The essence of Hardin’s story of tragedy is that herdsmen sharing a common pasture are led to think that by adding up more sheep due to unlimited grass would optimize them individually but, they ultimately ended up overstocking their herds and destroy their shared resource. Even though Hardin’s argument was originally made with reference to human population growth, it has become widely accepted as a general example or framework to explain various cases of resource that are being greedily overused …show more content…
A public good gets worn-out and tapered in value for everyone. I lived in a city for five years named Bangalore-India where the distance to travel is not measured in kilometers but it is measured in time due to the overwhelming traffic. It would easily take up to 45 minutes to cover 15kilometers.Public roads are a very interesting example of common property that are being shared by people all over the world, each person has his own interest in mind and no concern to how the property is being exploited, they are just worried as to how quickly and easily they can reach their destination, but when almost every individual believe that public roads are the easiest way to meet traveling needs the roads are then jammed up and slow down the overall traffic which in turn leads to filling the air with pollution from halting the cars.

Traffic jams do not just over use and harm the roads, but a lot of other things are also destroyed due to traffic jams, cars release several harmful pollutants, so imagine hundreds of cars halted in the same area releasing all these pollutants which irritates the pedestrians respiratory tract and cause health problems like asthma, coughing, chest pain and even premature death. When one resource is being over used the result does not just effect that particular resource but it affects other resources as well and at the end it is humans and animals …show more content…
Secondly, public transportation should be improved with more convenient buses so that it would encourage people to use them and also non-road based transportations also have to be improved like for example, trains and subways so that people will have a lot of options to travel and this would reduce the number of cars being used. Thirdly, there is an option of carpooling, which has been famous in the western world, people have to try to opt for olden methods for example in Europe most cities are still designed for the old modes of transport and due to this they can not maintain a large number of automobiles, this I frankly feel countries like India have to opt for instead of just extending the roads for more damage. Lastly we as individuals also have to take responsibility in reducing the exploitation of roads and take initiative instead of pin pointing the government, we have to try active transportation where in we can jog, walk, cycle etc. to near by destinations instead of using our cars, this would help us stay healthy, we get exercise out of it and we would be doing our part to save the