Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Ending The Tragedy of The Commons #TeamSeas" video.

Thank you for another great video! This does relate to economics, so it seems quite on-brand for your channel. I've used the phrase "The Tragedy of The Commons," but until now I'd never heard of Garrett Hardin, much less Lin Ostrom. But it sounds like Ostrom's research could be extremely helpful for us today. Maybe she should be much better known, along with her conclusions. It seems we're going about fixing the planet in a messy, every direction at once fashion, with top-down legislation and bottom-up initiatives happening simultaneously. What really interests me (at this moment sitting in front of the computer) is why so many people who utterly rely upon the environment haven't been cooperating with each other and self-regulating like Ostrom says they should. Maybe it's because until now all the people who use the ocean or the atmosphere or the forests haven't thought of themselves as a community. In her early research on the Las Angeles watershed, the people she was studying really did live next to each other, and they made decisions about water use that had immediate observable impact on their neighbors. Maybe that's why they managed to work out a compromise that didn't overextend the resource. When someone throws a piece of trash in the ocean, they're not thinking of the ocean as a shared resource. They're thinking of it as an infinite sink, and their little contribution seems so small it just disappears. There's no thought that their specific bit of trash might get swallowed by a turtle or wash up on a beach thousands of miles away. The turtles and the people who live on distant islands don't feel like members of our community, they feel like inhabitants of other worlds. Maybe it's that sense of the environment as an infinite sink, and the belief that people in different nations have competing and not shared interests that has stopped us from working together and making bottom-up rules. Until now, that is.
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