The Associated Press is reporting that Carolyn Maloney has introduced a bill proposing an expansion of wilderness areas in Western states. Western lawmakers, not so keen on having a New York congresswoman tell them what to do, are naturally resistant. Montana's Denny Rehberg criticizes it as a "top-down approach." It's a familiar refrain that ignores some of the system dynamics captured very well in the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a simple cost-benefit idea where the benefits of a person's action is held by the individual but the costs are carried by the entire society. The argument normally goes like this:

Imagine a parcel of open land that is a communal property where farmers are free to graze cattle. We understand that since the farmer keeps the profit from each cow, he gains 100% of the benefit of grazing that cow on the commons. Cattle, naturally, have an impact on the commons that causes a measurable amount of damage, but since the commons is owned by the community, the cost of that damage is distributed over the whole society. The result is that the cost to the individual farmer is a fraction of the benefit he receives: his benefit is 100% of each cow, but his cost to the commons is the damage of each cow divided by the number of people in the society. The rational farmer trying to maximize profit will simply continue adding to his herd. This continues until there are enough farmers each acting rationally that the total cost to the commons becomes 100% and the commons is destroyed through overgrazing. This is an intractable problem and one the cannot be solved by individual farmers acting rationally in their own best interest. It is a problem that must be solved as a group from the 'top down' either by artificially raising the individual's cost of using the commons or legislating limits on individual behavior. The economic theory surrounding this problem is very rich field, wikipedia offers a good start: Pareto efficiency, and Nash Equilibrium.

The Tragedy of the Common is a fundamental environmental issue and most of the really difficult environmental problems are in some way related to it. Consider pollution from cars. The cost to an individual from his car's exhaust is negligible (unless they share a small space) compared to the benefit the driver realizes from owning and driving it, but when enough people try to maximize their benefit without moderation we end up with smog. Or consider a farmer who realizes almost no cost by allowing runoff into streams on his property, but with enough farming we end up with dead zones along our shorelines. A cost that is borne by us all.

This is one of the major technical details where conservative political philosophy fails. In an attempt to maximize individual liberty, it fails to recognize the aggregate costs of individual actions, choosing instead to encourage moderation through traditional values and morality even when traditional values do not address the problems at hand. In its criticism of 'government interference' the conservative philosophy ignores the fact that the often best and sometimes only way to deal with the macro-level effects of individual choices is to find macro-level solutions that encourage or even force moderation on the individual level—a top-down approach that acknowledges that a group of individuals each making locally rational choices can have disastrous consequences. The invisible hand does not always work for us. It is a well-documented problem, with some very effective solutions, such as cap and trade tax systems for industrial pollution, gasoline taxes for individual drivers, and wilderness areas to sequester intact ecosystems in an attempt to preserve habitats and slow the alarming rate of extinction threatening the diversity of life.

The argument against wilderness almost always begins by describing the activities it limits—it limits logging and roads and mineral development, etc.—while ignoring the positive effects. Critics of wilderness often fail to acknowledge that our resources are finite, and they are still working from a 19th century point of view—a delusion—that says we can continued to develop land as long as we like without limit. Because our land and resources are finite, however, one way or another our development activities will eventually reach a limit. The landmass of the earth is about 57,491,000 square miles or 36,794,240,000 acres. It's a big number, but consider that it includes Antarctica, the great deserts, and that we as a species are are close to 7 billion strong. The wilderness advocate simply asks which commons would you prefer to live in:

A. The world in which we have developed every acre of land and are forced into moderation by finally reaching the limit of our resources?

B. The world which still has open spaces with a diversity of life and ecosystems in which we have chosen to moderate our activities before we reach the state of option A?

If Rep. Rehberg would like to see the result of a bottom-up approach, it is readily available on the right side of the US in the map above. We have taken very little time using a bottom-up approach to develop the eastern half of the United States. I wonder how Rep. Rehberg's constituents in Montana would feel about having this kind of development continue unfettered until the left half of the map looks like the right?

More on the Human Footprint Maps from the Wilderness Conservation Society