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Commons and Environmental Discourse
Part 1
Hardin’s essay concerning resource use indicates that common resources are always available and free for utilization by all individuals without any expectation of reciprocity from them. The free use of common resources is allowed because restricting the access to the same tends to be very costly and impossible. From research, common resources are connected to property rights that involve the right to open access to government property. Resource units are finite and subtractive meaning that the pool of the resources reduces in proportion to each unit that is consumed or used. This shows that each of the unit used ceases to exist upon depletion or utilization by the consumers.
A common refers to resource units and domains considered as public property and therefore open to communal utilization. According to Hardin (1996), resource domains are geographical spaces inclusive of auditoriums, fields or parking lots. On the other hand, a resource unit comprises of the building blocks of domains such as landfills, and bundles of fodder among others. Hardin also holds that people have the ability to preserve and nurture common resources proportionately to the freedom of attached to their utilization. Examples of commons not included in the publication include wind power and national parks.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a law developed to enhance environmental management in a given country. NEPA’s main purpose is to ensure that environmental factors are weighed equally to other issues in the decision making process taken by federal agencies. Alternative solutions to the dilemma tragedy include establishing regulations on the use of the resource in question. This could be through regulating a common good by imposing taxes or levies on the resources in order to avoid over-exploitation. For instance, charges on emissions and effluents and user fees should be established especially on waste disposal. Another solution includes creating and allocating rights to common resources as a way of preserving the integrity of the commons through access restraints that prevent resource exhaustion.
Part 2
Environmental discourse is a major pattern of thought, belief and practices that direct relationships to take specific directions. Examples of environmental discourse in the United States include ecological modernization, green romanticism, and sustainable development. Major assumptions of ecological modernization are linked to the environmental readaptation of economic and industrial development. This implies that an environment’s productivity such as the proper use of natural resources can be a major foundation of future economic and industrial growth and development as well as labor and capital productivity. This comprises of clean technologies and sustainable environmental management among others. Through this, solving environmental problems by enhancing efficiency in the use of natural resources becomes a sustainable function that promotes production of cleaner technologies.
Green romanticism assumes an ecocritical view of nature by holding that the love for nature results into the love for humanity. This implies that enhancing nature preservation lead to the progression of human well-being. Through this environmental discourse, the quest to have a balanced and a sustainable environment has been established with the realization of a just and improved society.
Sustainable development assumes current utilization of environmental resources without compromising the needs of the future generation. This implies that as much as the present generation utilizes natural resources, it should ensure that enough resources are safeguarded to meet the needs of the future generation. Therefore, this discourse promotes preservation and conservation of environmental resources such as water, forests among others.
A good instance of an environmental problem includes deforestation. This problem maybe resolved through the application of the sustainable development discourse. The given discourse will motivate people to use trees but ensure and replace that same in order to prevent resource depletion. Therefore, through sustainable development, reforestation and aforestation strategies will be implemented against the deforestation issue.
Works Cited
Hardin, Garret. The tragedy of the commons. New York: Cengage Learnings, 1996. Print.
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