They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common,
Yet let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from off the goose.
This widely used traditional quotation is generally thought to have arisen in seventeenth-century England at a time when parliament was passing Acts that allowed landowners to enclose common land for their own use. This practice led to many people losing their rights to cultivate land, graze their livestock and take wood for fuel use. In effect these families lost their livelihood.
Moving to the present day, ‘the commons’ has a wider meaning for environmental specialists. It refers to any resource held in common for the use or benefit of society as a whole such as air, water, land and eco-systems. In the modern context, the above quotation suggests that the commons can be degraded or removed at no cost to the person or organisation causing the damage.
Allow 20 minutes to complete this activity
Take a few moments to write down some commons in the context of sustainable resource management.
Your list will no doubt reflect your own concerns about the environment, but the commons that I am most concerned about at present are:
This is quite a wide-ranging list covering global and local issues, different environmental media (land, air and water), quantifiable areas such as local atmospheric levels of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and less quantifiable issues such as the loss of green-belt land.
In conventional economics, the cost of damage to the commons is neglected when compiling balance sheets, profit and loss accounts and financial statements. The cost of producing a good or providing a service is calculated by summing the costs of raw materials, energy, labour and other direct and indirect costs. These costs are known as the private costs.
It can be argued that, to calculate the true cost of an activity to society as a whole, costs should be apportioned to any damage caused to the commons and these damage costs should be taken into account. In this context, the commons could include people’s health, the general environment, buildings and crops. These damage costs are often referred to as external costs (or externalities). The discipline of environmental economics involves determining the level of these external costs and using economic instruments to make organisations and individuals liable for the external costs that they generate. Considering external costs raises significant questions such as:
In this activity, you will look at the first of these questions.
Allow 20 minutes to complete this activity
You have probably realised that quantifying these external costs is a highly complex subject. Spend a few minutes thinking about the examples that follow and then write down some of the problems in determining the external costs and how you would set about determining their correct level in each case:
(a) Greenhouse gas emissions
Much of the problem lies with determining who is affected by the damage and who should be compensated. For example, in the case of emissions from a fossil fuel power station in central USA should damage to the local community only be considered, or should rising sea levels that affect communities in (say) Asia be taken into account?
If this question can be solved there are several ways of determining costs such as:
(b) Arsenic emissions
In this case, the impacts will be generally felt in the local environment, but several questions still arise:
(c) Species extinction
This is an even more problematic area. On one hand, it could be argued that a species has no intrinsic value and therefore there should be no external cost. On the other hand, imagine a species of butterfly that pollinates a particular plant that forms part of a chain that has some ultimate value to humankind. In this case, it could be reasonable to allocate a value to the butterfly. Alternatively it is possible to take a less anthropocentric view and argue that the loss of any species devalues the planet as a whole and some level of compensation is appropriate.
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