Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: The High Tech-High Risk Wireless World

In 1968, Garrett Hardin, an eminent population ecologist from Santa Barbara, CA published an article in Science titled 'Tragedy of the Commons' that was immediately hailed as a landmark piece of thinking. This paper reshaped prevailing views about our place in the ecological network of the planet and was pivotal in defining how pursuit of our individual actions to maximize self-interest will, across populations all doing the same thing, result in diminished and overused environmental resources. Before sustainability was even a buzzword, Hardin created a way of seeing the world that emphasized how individuals must learn to recognize and to act with more in mind than squeezing one more cow onto the common pasture. He gave us new ways to think about how we might better manage our resources in the face of new technologies. He was not a believer in the technological fix. Those lessons are highly relevant today to the unchecked proliferation of wireless radiofrequency signals, thought by many to cause serious health consequences.