Whereas personal nostalgia peoples the mind with real memories, political nostalgia often travels back to a time that is as unreal as time travel itself.
| Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons
From Ground Water To Enclosure
I undertook the newish Resurfaced section here on workfutures.io as a way to reconnect with my own reading and thinking from past years, a way to rethink and explore paths lying latent in earlier notes and writings.
The Eula Biss quote above resurfaced from a newfound approach to personal nostalgia.
First, on 2026-08-29, my Obsidian daily note search offered up an article by David Leonhardt from 2023-08-29, entitled Uncharted Waters1, an evocative name for a prosaic topic. The subtitle is less poetic: The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.
Leonhardt gets the thrust of ‘the tragedy’ of the commons wrong. He cites the infamous Garrett Hardin who said the tragedy was inevitable. It isn’t, as Elinor Ostrom proved, but she goes unmentioned, about which more later.
But Leonhardt’s stats -- from Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle -- are terrifying:
‘Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.’ Another cornerstone of our economic system based on resource extraction, like energy from fossil fuels. Except now we are talking about eating and drinking.’
I searched but couldn’t find recent data on nationwide ground water stats, but the localized ones — like the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer which supports much of the agriculture in the midwest — are continuing to decline, and rapidly.
Leonhardt continues:
‘The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it.’
He makes the implicit claim that this is a proof of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. But Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom disproved his theory through her work with many different groups in many different places, where bottom-up agreements among those sharing a common resource—like grazing land for cattle in the Alps—avoided overuse of the commons, in some cases for hundreds or thousands of years. (A good analysis of her contributions can be found in A Review of Vlad Tarko’s Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography by David D’Amato2.)
I had made a link in the Leonhardt note I made in 2023 to an article by Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons3, from which I pulled the opening quote. Among the many things she tied together in that essay was the tale of Laxton, the last village in England that has not been enclosed. Enclosure means the displacement of ‘commoners’ from the ‘commons’ from which they could gather wood, graze sheep and cows, and fish. In Laxton, they have been communally farming for over 700 years.
But her debunking of Hardin’s thesis is compelling [emphasis mine]:
The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons. This is not just an attitude that passes for common sense but an economic theory: “The Tragedy of the Commons” was the title of a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. His essay has been cited so often that it has kept the word commons in use among people who know nothing about the commons. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” Hardin wrote. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”
Hardin was a white nationalist who subscribed to what is now called “replacement theory.” He believed that the United States needed to restrict nonwhite immigration, because, as he put it, “a multiethnic society is insanity.” In 1974, he published an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he warned of the dangers of creating a world food bank: “The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident,” he wrote, “bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons.”
Hardin was writing long after the commons had been lost to enclosure, and his commons was purely hypothetical. Actual, historical commons weren’t the free-for-all he imagined. In Laxton, villagers who held rights to Westwood Common could keep twenty sheep there, or the equivalent in cows. No one was allowed to keep more animals on the commons in summer than they could support in winter. Common rights were continuously revisited and revised in the course of centuries, as demand rose and fell. In 1662, the court fined a Laxton man “for not felling his part of thistles in the Town Moor.” As E. P. Thompson observed, “Commoners themselves were not without commonsense.”
What Hardin considers the “inherent logic of the commons” is actually the logic of capitalism, the dominant logic of our time. That logic dictates expansion, no matter the consequences, and it has brought our world, as Hardin warned it would, near ruin. “Ruin,” he wrote, “is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Freedom, in this context, is what we might call free enterprise, freedom having been redefined, in our age, as access to profit.
So, the tragedy of the commons lies in taking the commons away, appropriating what smallholders might have conserved, and instead placing the common resource — like the groundwater beneath the Midwest — into the gears of capitalist markets.
That’s fossil water, that was deposited there thousands or millions of years ago, and its recharge rate is less than an inch a year, while we’ve see the water level drop more than 200 feet in many locales.
The water being sucked from the ground at enormous rates is not principally being used by small farms, but by massive agricultural and industrial corporations, which are sucking the land dry. Like they enclosed the commons across England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, displacing the commoners who streamed to the cities to become factory workers, and ‘improving the land’ for industrial-scale farming.
In the US today, we are seeing the end result of industrial-scale farming: the last drops of groundwater are pumped out so alfalfa, soy, and corn can be sold and transported far away, along with the water still in the crops.
And when the farms fail, where will the farmers go? What factories will hire them, when all the water is gone? Have we lost our commonsense?
…
(By the way, the Eula Biss essay is a wonderful piece of writing, linking romantic poetry, her trip to Laxton, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in glorious prose. Read it. You’ll thank me.)
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