In a 1968 essay in Science, the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that a shared resource open to all will be overexploited because each user gains from taking more while the costs are spread across everyone. He used the image of herders adding cattle to a common pasture until it is ruined, and applied the logic to population, pollution and the environment. He concluded that such problems have no purely technical solution and require collective restraint or regulation. The argument became one of the most cited and contested in environmental and social science.
It framed the central dilemma of managing shared urban and environmental resources, from open space to clean air, and shaped debates on regulation and property. The essay set the terms that later work on the commons would answer and qualify.
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