There’s a factory upstream.
The people downstream take care of their little piece of the world. They look after the land, share resources, help their neighbors. They’ve figured out how to live together reasonably well.
And then the factory dumps something in the river.
As you know, this is the thought problem I’ve been unraveling lately. I’ve been trying to reconcile Hardin and Ostrom. Yes, people are selfish. Yes, they can cooperate. Yes, a community can manage what it shares. But the river doesn’t begin at the edge of town. Neither does the air. You can do everything right and still drink, breathe, and eat someone else’s irresponsibility.
Then I started wondering how Ronald Coase might fit into all of this. He postulates: if rights are clearly established and bargaining doesn’t cost anything, the people involved can negotiate an economically efficient solution. Maybe the factory pays for the damage. Maybe the people downstream pay the factory to stop causing it. That would depend on who holds the rights.
But… who gave the factory the right to poison the river in the first place? The government, of course. They’re the ones who give and take rights. I guess someone has to in a society, but still… why should the people downstream have to buy their way out of being harmed?
Coase was examining how economic arrangements work, but his theorem doesn’t establish that the rights we start with are morally defensible. He also understood that, in actual life, organizing people, negotiating agreements, and enforcing them can be expensive enough to prevent a solution altogether.
But before we get to the cost of negotiating, I have a problem with what we’re negotiating over.
If I threaten to damage your property unless you pay me, we generally have a word for that—extortion. Give me a business license and a discharge permit, however, and apparently the conversation becomes more sophisticated.
I think a right ought to require something more than legal permission. If exercising my right destroys your ability to live, there’s something wrong with my claim to it. Owning the factory doesn’t give me the right to hand off the consequences to everyone else. Those consequences don’t disappear because I’ve managed to make them someone else’s problem.
That’s where I’d begin.
Of course, beginning with morality doesn’t mean we’ve solved anything. People disagree about morality. We can justify an astonishing amount when our income depends on it. And almost everything we do affects someone or something. We can’t build a functioning community around the promise that nobody will ever cause any harm. But we can ask whether the harm is avoidable. Whether the benefit warrants the damage. Who gets to make that judgment. Who has to live with it. And whether the people saying yes would still say yes if their children were drinking the water.
Those seem like reasonable questions to ask before issuing the permit.
Hardin understood the trouble we get ourselves into. When I receive the benefit and everyone shares the cost, taking a little more can seem perfectly rational. And then… everyone else reaches the same conclusion. And, eventually, there’s very little left to take.
Ostrom showed that people can interrupt that process. They can establish limits, keep track of what’s happening, and hold one another accountable. Shared resources don’t have to end in shared ruin. But someone has to maintain the arrangements that prevent it. My question is how much we can reasonably expect from people, and how we organize around the answer.
Let’s see how all this might be applied.
Let’s assume that we’re primarily concerned with ourselves and the circles of people who matter to us. We join a community because something about belonging makes our lives better. Safety. Companionship. Help. Purpose. Even helping someone can give us something we need. We don’t have to reduce all of that to money for it to count as an advantage.
I’m willing to use that as a starting point.
So, a community has to be worth belonging to. It has to offer some benefit to me. That sounds obvious. Yet we often build organizations without taking that into consideration. We just ask people to attend meetings, join committees, volunteer, fill out forms, and support a vision. Then we wonder why participation fades.
At some point, a person is going to ask what any of this has to do with getting through today. Can someone help me get to work when my car breaks down? Can I borrow a tool? Is there someone who knows how to fix this? If I get sick, will anybody notice?
The contributions won’t be equal. Someone has time. Someone has skills. Someone knows everybody. Someone is barely holding on. We have to decide what we’re going to do about that last person, because a community organized entirely around immediate usefulness will eventually have a disposal problem.
People get old. They become disabled. They get overwhelmed. Some will always need more help than they can return. If our response is that they haven’t earned their place, then what have we built?
There has to be a moral commitment underneath the exchange. We can recognize that people look after their own interests while still expecting them to accept obligations. Belonging includes knowing that you won’t be discarded when you’re inconvenient. It also includes accepting that someone else’s need may occasionally cost you something.
And yes, some people will take advantage. We should expect that too. An inability to contribute and a determination to exploit everybody are different problems. We need enough familiarity to recognize the difference, and a fair way to deal with it when we disagree. Compassion doesn’t require an unlimited tolerance for abuse.
Then there’s the matter of actually running the thing.
I’ve spent enough time in committees to have questions about the assumption that more participation always produces better decisions. Everyone should have a voice in the things that govern their lives. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to help choose the office printer.
Agree on the purpose. Agree on the limits. Put capable people in charge of specific work, give them the authority to do it, and require them to account for what they’ve done. Let people challenge a decision without having to stage a revolution. Replace leaders who misuse their position. The money should be visible. So should the workload. If the same handful of people are doing everything, that’s an issue. If the leader’s friends always get the opportunities, that’s an issue too. A community can call itself cooperative and still operate like somebody’s private club.
And being local doesn’t make us virtuous. It just brings us closer together. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it means everyone knows who’s going to make their life difficult if they complain. People need protections that their neighbors can’t vote away. They need somewhere to take a serious grievance when the person causing the problem is also the person in charge. Local authority needs limits, just as distant authority does.
Still, I think bringing more of our lives within reach makes sense.
I’d like more of the people making decisions about a place to live with the results. I’d like communities to retain useful skills, some control over necessities, and the ability to do something when a distant system fails them.
I don’t expect my neighborhood to manufacture an MRI machine. We will continue to need things from elsewhere. We’d be foolish to abandon knowledge, medicine, or useful relationships because they crossed a border. But there’s a difference between choosing connections and being so dependent on them that you have no choices left.
What can we provide locally? What do we need from outside? And what happens if that source disappears?
Those are practical questions. The answers will vary from place to place. We should also ask whether the local solution is actually working. Are people getting help? Are the resources being maintained? Are we making life easier, or have we mostly created more meetings?
Then, just as we’ve got our little community functioning, we have to deal with the factory upstream. The people operating the factory have to be brought into an arrangement they can’t simply ignore.
We must all become better neighbors to one another—one way or another.
That means communities need relationships with other communities, and some agreements have to be enforceable. The towns along a river need rules that cover the river. They need shared information about what’s entering it, a way to investigate harm, and an authority capable of requiring someone to stop. When the consequences extend farther, the arrangements have to extend farther too.
Ostrom’s work allowed for governance at multiple levels. Local cooperation was never the whole of what she offered. But creating those connections is work, and keeping them accountable is more work. We shouldn’t pretend that giving something a council and a charter guarantees it will function. Nor can we make every protection optional. If each town can offer a company cheaper labor and weaker environmental obligations than the town next door, we’ve created a competition to see who’s desperate enough to accept the most damage. Calling the final agreement voluntary doesn’t remove the desperation behind it.
There need to be basic protections across communities, with responsibility for prevention and repair placed on those creating the harm. Some damage can be repaired. Some can’t. Paying compensation after a water supply is ruined isn’t the same as keeping it usable in the first place. And a company shouldn’t be able to distribute the profits, close its doors, and leave the cleanup as a community project.
And it goes both ways. We’re also obliged to look at what we’re sending in the other direction. Where does our garbage go? Whose water is being used to produce what we buy? What happens in the places supplying our comfortable local lives? We can’t congratulate ourselves on a clean neighborhood if we’ve simply arranged for the dirty work to happen somewhere we don’t have to see it.
The moral condition applies to us too.
Coase helps us think about the arrangements and the obstacles to making them work. Hardin reminds us how easily personal advantage can consume what everyone needs. Ostrom shows that people can govern shared resources successfully under workable conditions. What I’m adding is the question I started with: who, or what, gave us the right to make other people absorb the damage?
I don’t imagine that asking it will make humanity suddenly behave. Local communities can become selfish collectively as easily as their members can be selfish separately. Larger institutions can be captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate. Every arrangement we build will need attention, correction, and people willing to challenge it.
But we still have to live somewhere. We still need one another. And we still have to decide what we’re willing to permit in the name of prosperity.
Maybe we could start by trying to build a decent life within reach of one another, while accepting that the people beyond our reach have the same claim to one.
Including the people downstream.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did. Cheers, friends.
