Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism

Podcast: New Books Network / Cited – Green Dreams
Host: Gordon Caddick
Date: October 27, 2025
Featured Guests: Peter Stoutenmaier (historian, Marquette University), Miroslava Chavez Garcia (historian, UC Santa Barbara)
Episode Theme:
The episode traces the rise, influence, and deeply problematic legacy of environmentalist Garrett Hardin, author of "The Tragedy of the Commons." The story explores how Hardin’s ecological ideas fueled an ideological blend of population control, nativism, and far-right politics, leading eventually to a rejection by the very environmental and feminist movements he influenced. It emphasizes the persistence and even resurgence of Hardin’s ideas in today’s context of environmental politics, immigration, and the far right—contrasting his vision with that of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, who showed the power of collective management of commons.

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1. The Population Panic: 1960s and 1970s

• [03:05–06:56] The panic over overpopulation dominated the intellectual, political, and cultural climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, influencing conservationists, activists, and the first Earth Day events.

  "A Sierra Club flyer proclaimed that population growth is the root cause of all conservation problems." (Gordon Caddick, 03:22)

• The era’s fears featured centrally in pop culture (e.g., "Soylent Green," "ZPG") and through the rise of organizations like Zero Population Growth (ZPG) led by Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb."
• This anxiety about runaway population growth driven by the "iron laws" of biology would become the focus of Hardin’s work.

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2. Garrett Hardin: Biography and Intellectual Formation

• [10:03–15:48]
  • Hardin’s upbringing included polio and time on a Missouri farm shaped his “grim” outlook on life’s limits.

    "All my life I have been haunted by the realization that there simply isn't room for all the life that can be generated... refusing to cut down on the excess population ... is not being kind, they're being cruel." (Hardin, 11:13)

  • Studied zoology at University of Chicago, learning from mentors preaching Malthusian limits and biostatistics—which Hardin would later apply to humanity itself.
  • The idea of "carrying capacity" and inevitability of overshoot influenced his worldview.

    "Any increase in productivity would just be gobbled up by the continued increase in population." (Caddick, 14:09)

  • Hardin’s unwavering message: humans, like animals, were destined for population crashes unless consumption and reproduction were curtailed by force.

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3. Hardin and Abortion Rights: An Ideologically Scrambled Alliance

• [17:04–24:14]
  • Hardin’s public speaking debut was pro-choice, driven more by population control than by women's rights, according to interviews with Miroslava Chavez Garcia.

    "He even coined the slogan abortion on demand." (Narrator, 19:02)

  • In private, Hardin’s writings reveal a eugenic preoccupation with the reproduction of poor and marginalized groups.

    "He says... our problem is that too many of them are having abortions. The wrong people or the poor people." (Chavez Garcia, 20:25)

  • Enthusiastic participant in eugenics organizations, aligning with population control advocates and causing instability in alliances with feminist and reproductive rights movements.

    "He was a member of the American Eugenics Society for decades. And not just member, he was an officer." (Peter Stoutenmaier, 21:01)

  • Hardin was strategic, hiding his population-control motives to advance abortion rights.

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4. The Tragedy of the Commons: Theory and Influence

• [25:22–31:28]
  • The seminal 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" posits that individuals acting in self-interest will inevitably overuse shared resources, leading to their ruin.

    "So he's trapped in a system that compels him and all the others to overload this..." (Hardin, 26:46)

  • Hardin’s proposed solutions: enforce strict private property or centralized, coercive management.

    "He thought coercion was necessary and good." (Stoutenmaier, 28:05)

  • The essay crossed ideological lines with appeal to both left (anti-consumerism, anti-individualism) and right (market, state authority).

    "So it's either socialism or private property. Either one of those may work." (Hardin, 31:23)

  • Became the most-assigned environmental text, shaping policy debates far beyond academia.

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5. From Population Bomb to Lifeboat Ethics

• [32:46–36:59]
  • Alongside Paul Ehrlich’s "The Population Bomb," Hardin’s essays provided rationales for coercive population control, including sterilization—and especially anti-immigrant stances.
  • Hardin’s "Lifeboat Ethics" (1974): argued that rich nations must refuse aid to poor nations, for fear of being “swamped."

    "He asks us to consider that ... some catastrophe happens... your lifeboat fits 10 people, but 20 people want to get on... You need to kick the excess people off the lifeboat. You must let them die." (Stoutenmaier, 35:45)

  • Grounded in his variant of the "competitive exclusion principle" drawn from biology, which he misapplied to races and nations.

    "He believed that nations and races would inevitably compete over finite resources..." (Caddick, 39:02)

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6. Institutionalizing Eco-Nativism: From Activism to Influencing the Right

• [40:23–49:41]
  • Hardin’s direct activism: Encouraged by, and mentor to, John Tanton—a leader of ZPG, then founder of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), with funding from heiress Cordelia Scaife May.
  • FAIR became the premier anti-immigration organization in the US, heavily influencing legislation (1982, 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act).
  • Hardin publicly testified that immigrants would harm America's carrying capacity.

    "Each immigrant brings no natural resources, no energy... people can only consume or destroy useful energy." (Hardin, 44:33)

  • Despite high-profile events celebrating immigration, Hardin and May campaigned to remove pro-immigration symbolism (like Emma Lazarus’s poem) from the Statue of Liberty.
  • By the 1990s, Hardin became openly racist and ethno-nationalist; these views marginalized him but became embedded in segments of environmental and anti-immigration activism.

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7. Disillusion, Rejection, and the Ostrom Challenge

• [52:19–60:27]
  • The environmental and feminist movements distanced themselves after revelations of forced sterilizations and overt nativism; organizations like Sierra Club changed positions.
  • Hardin spent his last years isolated and physically declining, dying by suicide along with his wife in 2003.
  • Hardin’s core ecological argument—Commons must fail without coercion—faced its most decisive scientific challenge from Elinor Ostrom.
  • Ostrom, coming from a marginalized background, empirically demonstrated that communities worldwide often manage shared resources more sustainably and equitably than predicted.

    "There are thousands of examples of real world commons... that have been studied... and they look absolutely nothing whatsoever like the scenario that Hardin imagined in 1968." (Stoutenmaier, 55:13) "Ostrom would eventually prove that Hardin’s imagined pasture wasn’t real. It was just a fantasy." (Caddick, 56:55)

  • Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics (2009) for her work.

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8. The Lingering Legacy: Far-Right Environmentalism

• [65:15–70:15]
  • Hardin’s and Tanton’s ideas undergird the environmental justifications now used by the U.S. far right, including architects of Trump-era immigration policy (Stephen Miller) and media figures (Tucker Carlson).
  • Blood-and-soil environmentalism and the fusion of eco-nativism became rallying points for extremists, linked to actual mass violence (Christchurch, El Paso shootings).

    "The Christchurch perpetrator... The El Paso perpetrators manifesto was all about the invaders... then our environment will be saved." (Stoutenmaier, 68:18)

  • Host emphasizes the tragic persistence and dangers of Hardin’s worldview.

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9. Reflections: The Dangers of Dogmatic Expertise

• [61:03–64:21; 70:15–End]
  • The episode concludes with a meditation on why Hardin was once so influential: his dogmatic worldview was attractive to early environmentalism seeking technocratic certainty, but it was shaped by racist, classist, and sexist assumptions.

    "To just condemn Hardin would be to avoid a much more difficult and much more important why was he a darling of the environmental movement? ... his way of seeing the world was endemic to early environmentalism. And in some ways it still is." (Caddick, 62:31)

  • The host calls for a more hopeful, collective vision of environmental problem-solving, like that championed by Ostrom.

    "Can we collectively author a more environmentally just future? Garrett Hardin believed that we couldn’t, but I’d hope that you believe we can." (Caddick, 70:15)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Hardin’s Ideological Flexibility:

  "He just knew how to couch his message in a way that appealed to progressive sentiments even when he was motivated by quite regressive ones." (Caddick, 24:59)

• On the Enduring Allure of "Tragedy":

  “Tragedy of the Commons remains in 2025, one of the most popular, most consistently assigned texts. It outranks any text by Plato, by Rousseau, by Martin Luther King Jr.” (Stoutenmaier, 07:16)

• Ostrom’s Challenge:

  "When Gert Hardin published his paper in Science in 1968 on the tragedy the Commons, I thought, gee, he has just made this up as he talked. ... It wasn't here's my data. It is imagine a pasture open..." (Ostrom, 56:30)

• On the Links to Modern Extremism:

  “The intellectual architects of [Trump’s] anti-immigrant politics don't all make those claims. Actually, just the opposite. Climate change and environmental degradation have become key justifications to shut the border." (Caddick, 67:00)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–02:39 — Ads and show intro
• 03:05 — Introduction to the 1960s population panic
• 06:56 — Garrett Hardin and his enduring influence
• 10:03 — Hardin’s early life and intellectual formation
• 17:04 — Hardin’s abortion rights activism
• 25:22 — "Tragedy of the Commons" explained
• 32:25 — Emergence of Lifeboat Ethics and sterilization advocacy
• 40:23 — Creation of FAIR and the eco-nativist campaign
• 49:51 — Hardin's marginalization after mainstream rejection
• 54:47 — Scholarly and practical debunking by Ostrom
• 65:15 — The persistence of eco-nativist ideas in the hard right
• 68:18 — Modern extremist violence and its links to Hardin’s legacy
• 70:15–End — Host’s final call for alternative, hopeful models of environmental cooperation

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Tone & Approach

• The episode is thoughtful, critical, and clear-eyed about the seductive danger of Hardin’s ideas, balancing scholarly assessment with narrative storytelling.
• The hosts and guests maintain an academic but conversational tone, leavened with historical quotes and present-day relevance. There is a strong focus on how ideology, science, and policy intersect with issues of race, class, and power.

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This summary provides an in-depth understanding of the episode’s arc, arguments, and significance, with timestamps and quotation attributions for major points. It is designed to be valuable for listeners and non-listeners alike.

Transcript

[Gordon Caddick]

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[Peter Stoutenmaier]

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[Gordon Caddick]

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[Narrator/Producer]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he.

[Gordon Caddick]

Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Gordon Caddick]

I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Narrator/Producer]

Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[Gordon Caddick]

That's how Good leads the [e-mail], it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello New Books Network listener. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably finding it on one of the NBN's disciplinary channels. As you might have figured out already, this great network syndicates our podcast, which is called Cited as in Academic Citation. So I think this is the podcast for you. This season of Sighted is called Green Dreams and this happens to be the last episode of our season. Green Dreams tell stories about influential environmental theorists and it explores the impact that they have had on environmental movements, for good and for ill. You can find our episodes across the network, but if you want an easy way to access them all in one place, you should go directly to Sighted. You can find that wherever you find your podcasts [e-mail] that's C I T E D podcast.com okay, on with the show. I'm Gordon Caddick and this is Cited.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Our cities are going to be choked with people, they're going to be choked with traffic, they're going to be choked with crime, they're going to be choked with pollution. And they will be impossible places in which to live. And the explosions will be even worse.

[Gordon Caddick]

That's Richard Nixon back in 1967, warning of the dangers of overpopulated cities. That kind of warning was extremely common in the late 60s and early 70s. The historian Thomas Robertson documents this in his book the Malthusian Moment. Robertson shows that the population panic dominated political, intellectual, artistic and even activist circles. In fact, it was central to early American environmentalism. Like in 1968, a Sierra Club flyer proclaimed that population growth is the root cause of all conservation problems. On the first Earth Day in 1970, students organized Cork the Stork parades. And when population control advocates gave lectures, they attracted huge audiences of activists. Plus, the population panic was in the culture too.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

New York City in the year 2022. Nothing runs anymore. Nothing works.

[Gordon Caddick]

I'm sure you've heard of Soylent Green. The 1973 movie is set in a city so crowded, the stairways and hallways of apartment buildings are just full of sleeping people. There's nowhere to put them and the main character has to literally jump over them. But plus there's nothing left to eat. Nothing except Soylent Green.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

What they need most is Soylent Green. The supply of Soylent Green has been exhausted.

[Gordon Caddick]

I'm certain you already know, but in case you don't, spoiler alert. Soylent Green is people. That's one way to deal with the supposed population problem. Another is to outlaw childbirths and make them punishable by death.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

The Earth can no longer sustain a continuously increasing population.

[Gordon Caddick]

That was the premise of the 1972 movie ZPG, which stands for zero population growth.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

As of today, the 1st of January, we join with all other nations of the world in the following edict. Childbearing is herewith forbidden.

[Gordon Caddick]

No, ZPG wasn't just pure sci fi dystopia. Actually, the very name came from a real group. A group co founded by the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich.

[Gordon Caddick]

You have to get the death rate.

[Narrator/Producer]

And birth rate in balance.

[Gordon Caddick]

And there's only two ways to do it. One is to bring the birth rate down. The other is to push the death rate up. After Ehrlich appeared on the tonight show in 1969, ZPG grew to over 35,000 members. This all stemmed from his blockbuster book, the Population Bomb. The Population Bomb predicted that runaway population growth would lead to mass famine because our finite planet could Just not keep up with the geometric growth of population. The book sold over 2 million copies. Now, over 50 years later, it seems like the population panic has most come and gone. That's certainly what I thought before I started this story, but it turns out I was totally wrong. There is a particular kind of Neo Malthusian thinking that persists today, and it's shaping our politics in disturbing ways. This episode's green dreamer is somebody named Garrett Hardin. He was one of Ehrlich's compatriots in the population struggle. Not quite as media savvy, but maybe even more influential. Do you remember Tragedy of the Commons? That's Hardin. You probably read Tragedy of the Commons.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

I can give you some data on just how popular Tragedy of the Commons remains on college syllabi today.

[Gordon Caddick]

This is the environmental historian Peter Stoutenmaier. He'll figure prominently in this episode. He took a look at the open syllabus project to see just how influential Tragedy of the Commons has become.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

So I went and perused it yesterday and it genuinely astonished me. Tragedy the Commons remains in 2025, one of the most popular, most consistently assigned texts. It outranks any text by Plato, by Rousseau, by Martin Luther King Jr. It's amazing.

[Gordon Caddick]

We're going to tell you the story of how Hardin's work became the intellectual justification for a kind ecologically conscious nativism. In fact, there is a direct line from the Tragedy of the Commons to the Trump administration. But for much of his life, Hardin would have been seen as a pathbreaking intellectual and maybe even a progressive figure because he defined a generation of environmental scholarship and environmental politics. It's Hardin's green dream that led him to these dark places. This dream wasn't a pleasant one. It was definitely a nightmare. Yet for him and his many followers, it wasn't a dream at all. It was just the reality of the world as it is and the world as it always will be. But his understanding of the world was fatally flawed. After the break, Alec Opperman and I bring you the Green Lifeboat. Garrett Hardin's tragic environmentalism. How do young organizers shut down a polluting incinerator in their neighborhood? What's the environmental cost of ice raids? And how is ecological restoration unfolding after indigenous led dam removals on the Klamath River? The climate dispatch is back for season two, and this time they're looking all across California. From the sanitation struggles in San Diego to rising seas threatening the Bay Area. They are digging into the fights that shape how we live, move and survive in a changing climate. The Climate Dispatch is produced by the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter in collaboration with Stranded Astronaut Productions and hosted by Taya Jeannette. They dive deep into the climate crisis from a Californian perspective through personal stories, community voices and through the urgent questions shaping our future. Each episode brings you eye opening conversations with climate leaders, with organizers and everyday people making a difference. Plus they close each show with a performance from a California based artist. Listen to the climate [e-mail] climate dispatch or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator/Producer]

Garrett Hardin understood the cold realities of the natural world from a young age. Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1915, the young Garrett was infected with polio when he was just four years old. It permanently stunted the growth of one of his legs, but he was well enough to help out on the family farm.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

By the time I was 11 or 12, I was in charge of about 500 chickens, which I had to take care of, feed and water, and I had to kill a chicken every day for lunch.

[Gordon Caddick]

That cited producer Jay Coburn playing the role of Garrett Harden, and those words he's reading are from a 1997 interview where Hardin reflected back on his summers at the family farm in Butler, Missouri.

[Narrator/Producer]

The Hardin family farm had a grim ritual. Every so often the population of farm cats grew to an unsustainable level and inevitably disease struck, wiping out most of the cats. But the remaining cats would grow and grow, and the whole process repeated itself.

[Gordon Caddick]

Until Hardin's uncle started to cull what he called the superfluous cats.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

All my life I have been haunted by the realization that there simply isn't room for all the life that can be generated. And the people who refuse to cut down on the excess population of anything and not being kind, they're being cruel.

[Gordon Caddick]

Garrett Hardin saw our entire world like he did, that farm humans were not unlike those superfluous cats. One way or another, we'd end up being culled.

[Narrator/Producer]

Hardin developed this thinking as an undergraduate during the Great Depression. He had initially wanted to study drama, but with that childhood limp, he felt that he didn't have a future on stage. So he chose zoology instead, and he studied at the University of Chicago.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin was mentored by a zoologist and ecologist named Warder C. Allee.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Now the lectures in his class I would describe as standard Malthusian theory.

[Narrator/Producer]

These words are from a 1983 oral history project from the University of California.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Santa Barbara, and when I use the word Malthusian, I do not use it in a derogatory sense. I regard this as high praise. I regard the Malthusians as Primarily right. He also told us about the work of Raymond Pearl.

[Gordon Caddick]

Pearl was a biologist, and his early work looked at the fertility patterns of chickens. But he was also a statistician, and he pioneered the field of biometry or biostatistics. Perl and the other biostatisticians didn't just study specific organisms or specific groups of organisms. They looked at things in much broader terms. They developed sophisticated models to chart population level trends. Pearl claimed that he had discovered iron laws of population growth. Hardin also learned about the conservationists Henry Osborn and William Vaught. Without going into all their research, here's the important point I want to emphasize now. These folks modeled animal populations. Then they grafted their models onto humans.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

So to a biologist, the human being seems like one species among many.

[Gordon Caddick]

As Hardin put it in that educational video from 1999, we are just one species among many. That means that our own population would also follow these iron laws.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Most biologists were aware of this in advance of the others because they see human beings as another animal. And the principles that apply to the others apply to us.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin also learned about the idea of carrying capacity.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

The population of a region is determined by the carrying capacity, and that, of course, is affected by the scale of living, the standard of living you want to endure.

[Gordon Caddick]

According to him, this is the foundation of ecological thinking. Every environment has finite limits. It has a maximum population size. Hardin believed there was no technological escape from the problem of carrying capacity, because any increase in productivity would just be gobbled up by the continued increase in population.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

The increase in population comes about through the very natural process of reproduction. And left to themselves, people will have too many children, and then you're in real trouble.

[Gordon Caddick]

Exceeding your carrying capacity would mean overshoot. Something would then have to bring us back. And often it was something rather bleak. Disaster, famine, disease, or war. So this was the basic message that Hardin took from his early studies in zoology. Humans are animals just like any other. We have insatiable appetites for consumption and reproduction. That means that we eventually hit our environment's carrying capacity, which means overshoot. Then there'd be painful consequences.

[Narrator/Producer]

As Garrett Hardin recounted in that UCSB oral history, he was convinced of this grim reality.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

I have been thoroughly indoctrinated as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago with WCR Lee, with. With the reality of the population problem. You cannot solve the population problem by increasing supplies, because no matter how much you increase supply, the growth of the population will absorb it all.

[Gordon Caddick]

After the University of Chicago, Hardin got a research job in a lab. But he quickly discovered that that was not really his thing. He was much more into writing and teaching.

[Narrator/Producer]

So he got a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1946. Actually, back then, UCSB was called Santa Barbara College of the University of California. It wasn't considered a very good school. It was a small, teaching focused college. But it was perfect for this emerging educator. Hardin wrote a popular intro to biology textbook, and he became a go to teacher in the department. He taught huge classes, like 900 people big. So the university started to film his lectures and beam them across campus. Sometimes he taught as many as 18 different rooms at once.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin certainly was a scholar, but his true gifts were as a popularizer and performer. Over his career, he'd star in educational TV programs, testify before Congress, and write countless opinion articles in national newspapers. He fancied himself as a wise public intellectual, bestowing his hard truths to the masses.

[Narrator/Producer]

Now, his first big act of public intellectualism. It's not something you'd expect. Garrett Hardin was an early champion of abortion rights.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

So essentially what happened in 1963, the university here at UC Santa Barbara asked him to give a talk.

[Gordon Caddick]

This is Miroslava Chavez Garcia, a professor at ucsb. Chavez Garcia has worked extensively with the university's archives of Hardin's personal letters.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

He even says his sort of entree into abortion rights was by accident.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin did not start out as a campaigner for abortion rights, but he was a scientist and his scientific training taught him that all this religious moralism about abortion just didn't make sense.

[Narrator/Producer]

Chavez Garcia tells us Hardin wanted to take on the taboo of abortion. Remember, this was about a decade before Roe V. Wade.

[Gordon Caddick]

So 900 students watched his taboo busting talk. In fact, 300 more lined up outside, but they couldn't get a seat.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

That was a real watershed in my life because my new life opened up, so to speak, the moment I finished the lecture, people were coming up to the platform, principally women, to make some remark about their own abortions.

[Narrator/Producer]

And women started calling, asking for help.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

He helped students. You know, he had a list of doctors in Mexico, and then some people went to Japan and other countries as well to get these performed. Now, he didn't find these doctors by himself, but he worked with other activists.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

One of the things I like about abortion conferences is that you meet the nicest people out there.

[Gordon Caddick]

This is from a conference that Hardin chaired in 1969. He called it, We Need Abortion for the Children's Sick.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Most women who should have abortions want them, and for the best of all possible reasons, because they love children. For the sake of the children already born. A woman wants desperately to avoid having one too many.

[Narrator/Producer]

He became an expert spokesman for the abortion reform movement. He was active in Planned Parenthood. He even coined the slogan abortion on demand. And this became a feminist rallying cry.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Our greatest advance in the last decade has been in removing the taboo from the word abortion. Five years ago, many people thought I was terribly courageous in discussing the subject in public. Now no one flatters me anymore in this way. Everybody talks about abortion.

[Narrator/Producer]

Then on January 22, 1973, a major victory.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions. The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end a pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin was a useful ally to feminist campaigners in the lead up to Roe v. Wade. But he wasn't actually motivated by the cause of women's liberation. He was in it for population control.

[Narrator/Producer]

Reasons, and not population control in general. Control of particular populations, poor people and people of color. He didn't stress this as much in his public talks, but Chavez Garcia saw it clearly in his personal letters.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

He writes about it in several moments in these letters where he says that upper class, middle class women, they can get abortions. They know they have the money, they have the means. That's not our problem here. And actually, he says, our problem is that too many of them are having abortions. The wrong people or the poor people. Right. Women who are impoverished, who should be getting abortions, don't have access to them. So that's the problem.

[Gordon Caddick]

So Hardin was forging this ideologically scrambled alliance under the banner of his abortion activism. This was an alliance that brought together women's rights campaigners, but also population control advocates inspired by eugenic thinking.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

He was a member of the American Eugenics Society for decades. And not just member, he was an officer.

[Narrator/Producer]

This is Peter Stoudenmaier. He is a historian at Marquette University and he focuses especially on far right environmentalism. But also he looks at the ideologically scrambled nature of green politics in general.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

In the environmental movement, there is a. If you ask me, there is a consistent confusion between left and right. That's one of the things I study in the history of environmentalism, is the convergence between left and right versions of environmental thought.

[Gordon Caddick]

Eugenics is also one of those confusing places. Today it is obviously much more associated with the far right, but it was a Progressive era movement. It was extremely popular among intellectuals before World War II. Like all those early ecologists that Hardin studied. They were eugenicists.

[Narrator/Producer]

Eugenics was also very common in population control circles.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

Like a lot of other population politics from that era, they have a kind of non racialized set of racial implications. Maybe that's too fancy a term, but what I mean by that is they manage to make a series of very powerful claims without having to cast those claims in explicitly racial terms. Hardin doesn't talk a lot about race specifically. Every once in a while he does, but most of the time he doesn't bother. But the racial implications are pretty clear once you figure out what he's actually getting at.

[Narrator/Producer]

Hardin saw the world through discrete biological races, and the iron laws of population told him that other races would outbreed the white race effectively. His abortion advocacy was motivated by a biological articulation of the Great Replacement theory.

[Gordon Caddick]

It wasn't only Hardin. Eugenics was also very common in the birth control movement. The radical feminist scholar Linda Gordon makes this case convincingly in her 1974 article, the Politics of Population, Birth Control and the Eugenics Movement. The basic historical point is after World War II, eugenics was much less ideologically scrambled. For obvious reasons. It became quite unpopular and outright eugenic thinking became much more associated with the far right. But all those eugenicists are still around, so where do you think they go? They found a new vehicle. Gordon shows that they slipped almost imperceptibly into the birth control movement. And for a while they actually pushed the movement away from its radical roots, its roots of women's liberation. They pushed the movement towards something family planning. But eugenicists and population control advocates like Hardin did actually advance the cause of mid century above abortion campaigners. They were useful allies, but this was.

[Narrator/Producer]

A rather unstable alliance because again, this wasn't actually about women's reproductive freedom. Hardin admitted as much. He saw birth control and population control as very different things. And sometimes a community's right to curtail births would supersede a woman's right to choose.

[Gordon Caddick]

The thing is, he didn't actually tell his feminist allies that in the 1960s. That only came later. In a 1997 interview, Hardin confessed to.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Mention abortion's effect on population growth would be to arouse the suspicion that I was a nasty Nazi. So for the 10 years of my abortion activity, I religiously stayed away from population. In my public presentations.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin consistently forged these strange alliances, alliances that didn't make a whole lot of sense, but somehow they came together. And this is part of the reason why. He just knew how to couch his message in a way that appealed to progressive sentiments even when he was motivated by quite regressive ones. That's the lesson of Hardin's early abortion activism.

[Narrator/Producer]

He'd do the same kind of thing with the environmental movement, starting with his most famous work, the Tragedy of the Commons.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

I think, like many people, I read his famous essay from 1968, the Tragedy of the Commons, when I was an undergraduate. In fact, I read it twice. Two different courses assigned that reading. It's a very abstract, it's only six pages long. This is not a long, it's not a book. It's a short, condensed article.

[Gordon Caddick]

The Tragedy of the Commons came out in the journal Science.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

In very simple terms, Hardin offers us a thought experiment. He imagines a group of cattle owners who surround a commonly owned pasture.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Suppose you have a commons open to everybody. Each person wants to add more and more cattle to his herd.

[Narrator/Producer]

This interview is from a 1972 video produced for biology students.

[Gordon Caddick]

With those very well timed moves, the.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Trouble is that this eventually overloads the commons. But the loss that's taken by each person is only a fraction of the total loss. Whereas the gain by adding one more animal, he gets almost all of the game.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

The tragedy is that the pasture is going to be overgrazed. The pasture land will be sooner or later overrun with far too many cattle, and the grassland will give out.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

So he's trapped in a system that compels him and all the others to overload this, each one seeking his own interest.

[Narrator/Producer]

The logic is straightforward and, at least at first blush, pretty compelling.

[Gordon Caddick]

Just hold on one sec. You've got to walk me through that. Why would the ranchers decide to destroy their own commons?

[Narrator/Producer]

Okay, well, each individual rancher gains from adding a new cow to the pasture. But here's the rub that cow is taking from the collective commons. So everybody has a little bit less.

[Gordon Caddick]

So everyone is losing out, including the rancher who put in the extra cow.

[Narrator/Producer]

Okay, but when the rancher adds the new cow, they always gain more than they lose. They've gained the value of one full cow. But the loss of usable pasture is born collectively, and it's in every rancher's self interest to just keep doing this until the commons has been totally trashed. Hardin felt the logic was inescapable.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

I had a terrible time writing it. I think largely because many of the conclusions I didn't like myself. I found them very unpleasant. I think I was fighting them every inch of the way. But having once started on a train of thought, I just couldn't escape these conclusions.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

He thought there was no way around the tragedy. Unless you introduced coercion, a term that he used positively, he thought coercion was necessary and good.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Finally, you have to do either one of two things. Either you divide the pasture up into many different pieces of private property and each person is responsible for his own. Or you say, we'll manage this as a group, we'll appoint a manager, we'll pay him to manage this, and he will tell us how many cattle we can put on the land and we have to do as he says.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

So from his point of view, the way to solve the problems as he understood them was to impose solutions through coercive means, because people couldn't be trusted to work out their own problems themselves. He thought that coercion was the only way to achieve meaningful environmental progress and that if other people did not see the wisdom of that, it would have to be imposed on them.

[Narrator/Producer]

The Tragedy of the Commons was a hit. It was immediately cited by reporters, environmentalists, policymakers and researchers from all sorts of fields. Almost overnight, Hardin became a foremost environmental authority. Still, to this day, the tragedy remains influential. It's more frequently assigned in college courses than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which means it might just be the most important environmental text of all time.

[Gordon Caddick]

We'll definitely get into the essay's problems later, but for now it's worth dwelling on why the Tragedy of the Commons would have been so compelling. The essay was just perfectly timed because 1968 was an auspicious year. There was, of course, a burgeoning environmental movement, and when they looked around, they saw terrible pollution everywhere. They started asking, why would we so recklessly destroy our environment? Hardin offered a clear and coherent answer. He claimed that we were doing this to ourselves because we were trapped by our very natures.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

But he meant it in 1968 as a larger metaphor for environmental challenges.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Once you catch on to the idea of the commons as a system, you realize it applies to many other areas, including that of pollution. You see, what we're doing in this area is using the water and the air as a common ground in which to dump our pollutants.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin's tragedy could resonate with left leaning environmentalists and new left radicals because he was really attacking the prevailing threat. Thinking like he argued that quick technological fixes could never solve our environmental problems. He also railed against individualism and the assumptions of laissez faire economics. And he said over and over again, the key problem here is the American habit of over consumption. But the tragedy could also resonate with right leaning audiences, because, yes, Hardin suggested that you could use the state to avoid this tragedy. But he also suggested that you could use the market.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

So it's either socialism or private property. Either one of those may work.

[Gordon Caddick]

Another ideologically heterodox set of ideas in the making. In Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin also railed against laissez faire attitudes in the reproductive commons. He claimed that the same logic of pollution applied to reproduction, left unchecked, we would just overpopulate our Commons. The 1968 article has become a kind of Magna Carta of compulsory population construction. And that very same year another important population text came out, the one I mentioned in the intro, Paul Ehrlich's the Population Bomb. You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance. And there's only two ways to do it. One is to bring the birth rate down. The other is to push the death rate up.

[Narrator/Producer]

Ehrlich co founded a group called ZPG, or zero population growth. By the early 70s, ZPG had over 35,000 members.

[Gordon Caddick]

We don't even really know where the.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Right level is, but basically we're looking.

[Gordon Caddick]

For a mix that keeps population growth stable and we don't care how it's done.

[Narrator/Producer]

This tape is from a C SPAN interview with Susan Weber, a member of zpg. Weber doesn't care how it's done.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

There are larger issues besides the individual's choice.

[Gordon Caddick]

And the more we put off trying to dealing with problems that come from population growth, the more drastic the measures.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

That have to be employed later on.

[Narrator/Producer]

Ehrlich and Hardin both suggested that less coercive measures would be a good first step, but more drastic measures would likely be necessary. For instance, they both supported sterilization campaigns.

[Gordon Caddick]

But how are they so certain? Certain enough to support such extreme measures? Well, it goes back to those biological models that I explained earlier. The models that told them that we had this animalistic urge that could be charted along iron mathematical laws of population growth which would make us hit our carrying capacity and then overshoot that capacity.

[Narrator/Producer]

Ehrlich and Hardin shared those core ideas in common. So they saw each other as compatriots in the struggle against population growth. But Ehrlich tended to see the population problem in more abstract and universal terms.

[Gordon Caddick]

That's where the biggest daylight was between the two of them. Hardin wanted ZPG to take a more anti immigrant stance. Here's where Hardin's eugenic thinking lines up with his population concerns. He believed that the irresponsible outbred the responsible and that the underdeveloped outbred the developed. So for Hardin, the Problem of overpopulation was just obviously a problem of the developing world.

[Narrator/Producer]

From 1972 to 1975, there was a devastating famine in Ethiopia. The country desperately needed food aid, but Hardin opposed giving that aid.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

When a nation, say, like Ethiopia, begs for food from elsewhere, this is being irresponsible. And unfortunately we like to play Santa Claus.

[Gordon Caddick]

This tape is from another educational video, this one produced in 1990.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

We like to be the Good Samaritan. We send food to a country like Ethiopia and that permits them to continue to be irresponsible. The point is there are really too many people in Ethiopia for their resources.

[Narrator/Producer]

For the record, the famine was not the result of runaway population growth. It was a mix of severe drought and government corruption.

[Gordon Caddick]

According to estimates, as much as a quarter of a million people died by early 1974. Governments around the world did start to provide life saving food aid, much to Hardin's chagrin. So in response, he wrote his second most famous text, Lifeboat the Case Against Helping the Poor, that was published in Psychology Today, September 1974.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

It is once again a thought experiment similar in that regard to Tragedy of the Commons. He asks us to consider that we're all on a big ship of humankind, basically is on a great big ship and some catastrophe happens. Oh, like say, the global environmental catastrophe. And there's not enough lifeboats. Let's pretend that your lifeboat fits 10 people, but 20 people want to get on the lifeboat. What's going to happen if all 20 people try to get on the lifeboat? It's going to capsize and Sink and all 20 people will drown. What Hardin says there is you need to kick the excess people off the lifeboat. You must let them die.

[Narrator/Producer]

Hardin claimed that food aid would be pedristic. That means it would create a feedback loop that would make things worse. More people wanting more from the rich nations of the world, either in the form of aid or in the form of immigration. But Hardin claimed we can't help them. The lives of poor people must be sacrificed so that rich people can protect themselves.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

Those of us who are lucky to be in our nice little lifeboat in what he called the first world. We need to protect that precious lifeboat. It could not be a clearer metaphor for shut the borders, don't let anyone else in, because they will sink the entire thing.

[Gordon Caddick]

This monstrous conclusion was the inevitable outcome of how Hardin interpreted certain ecological ideas. That's according to the philosopher Jason Oakes. Hardin believed firmly in something called the competitive exclusion principle. The idea is that two organisms with identical needs cannot sustain themselves within the same ecological niche. They'll just be locked in competition and eventually one will have to overwhelm the other. The competitive exclusion principle emerged at the turn of the century and was formulated into a law during Hardin's studies. It was based on how tiny organisms behaved in a lab. But by the 1950s, this is an idea that took a lot of heat. Today, most ecologists will tell you that the principle just isn't universal. It doesn't always apply in the natural world world. In fact, many ecologists stress that species coexistence is actually more common than competitive exclusion. But for Hardin, he assumed the competitive exclusion principle was indeed an iron law, and he applied that law to the world at large. He made this case in another Science article, this one much less well known. It was called the competitive exclusion principle, and it came out in 1960.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

In the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that it is a basic axiom of biological theory. And it is basic also to sociological and economic theory.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin also saw the world through discrete biological races organized into discrete nation states. And he applied the competitive exclusion principle to that model of the world. He believed that nations and races would inevitably compete over finite resources. So, as he claimed in a 1991.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Interview, if two cultures compete for the same bit of turf, and if one of the populations increases faster than the other, then year by year the population that is reproducing faster will increasingly outnumber the slower one.

[Gordon Caddick]

The competitive exclusion principle undergirded Hardin's anti immigrant views. But as Jason Oaks argues, it also led him to believe that a totally laissez faire economic system would be irrational because then the world would be dominated by social conflict. This meant that Hardin made space for state planning. And more fundamentally, he argued that ecology should direct economic policy and immigration policy. Back then, these politics would have been hard to classify. Part of Hardin's thinking could appeal to the left, to the right, and to the center. I think that's part of the reason why he was so influential. But at its core, Hardin's work was an intellectual justification for eco conservatism.

[Narrator/Producer]

This made Hardin something of an outlier, even in population control circles. So let's go back to that population control movement led by Paul Ehrlich. Hardin didn't think Ehrlich's ZPG was radical enough, but he had allies in the group, specifically a guy named John Tanton.

[Gordon Caddick]

Tanton was an eye doctor, environmentalist, and leader in Planned Parenthood. After reading the Population Bomb, he joined ZPG as one of its earliest members.

[Narrator/Producer]

He was president of ZPG from 1975 to 1977. He pushed the group to take a hardline anti immigrant stance. Ehrlich did initially offer some support to immigration restrictions, but he eventually softened his stance. So Tanton wanted to start something more.

[Gordon Caddick]

Radical and Hardin would help him. Tanton met hardin back in 1970 as part of an Earth Day celebration. Shortly after, Tanton asked Hardin to publicly support his anti immigrant politics. But at that point, Hardin wasn't quite ready to speak out publicly. Instead, he only agreed to quietly mentor Tanton and edit his writing.

[Narrator/Producer]

Just like earlier with his abortion activism, Hardin proves to be a savvy political operator. He doesn't quite reveal his true intentions until he feels that people are ready.

[Gordon Caddick]

But also, maybe Tanton and Hardin weren't quite ready themselves. They didn't have a political apparatus to implement their ideas. For that, they needed a benefactor.

[Narrator/Producer]

They'd find one in Cordelia's gave maybe May came from the Mellon Scaife family. You can find their name emblazoned on Carnegie Mellon University. Cordelia Scaife. May was one of the richest women in the United States, but she didn't exactly live the life of an heiress.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

She's pretty much a hermit. Her closest friend who came to dinner one night was like the woman who used to take care of her house. So she doesn't get out much, but she communicates with Garrett Hardin. And so they develop a friendship and they develop an epistolary relationship that begins in this period and it goes for 30 years. They write to each other more often than you see each other, but nevertheless, they have a lot in common. She goes to him for all of his ideas, she praises his ideas, and, you know, whenever he publishes something, she sends it to all her friends.

[Narrator/Producer]

Chavez Garcia has poured over decades of their private letters. They are extremely frank. In one letter to May, Hardin recounts an exchange that he had with a senator's office back in 1981.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

In aide asked Hardin, what do you think about immigration? Is it a liberal or is it a conservative issue? He says, personally, I don't think of immigration as either a liberal or a conservative issue. The question is, does one have enough patriotism to want one's nation and its civilization, its culture to survive? I don't see how either liberal conservative could answer no to this question, but I'm afraid some of my liberal friends do. So again, this idea of do you want one's nation, its civilization, its culture, suits survive. So you know the early makings of the white replacement theory. Definitely.

[Narrator/Producer]

May was convinced by Hardin's theories. And she was ready to put money behind them. In 1979, May helped create an organization called FAIR.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

So FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was established in 1979 by John Tanton.

[Narrator/Producer]

Tanton led the charge. Hardin provided the ideas and May the wallet.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

Cordelia Mace Gaif, I think provides 50,000 an issue, 100,000. I mean she provides them millions over the decades. And in the oral histories, one of the directors of FAIR says like without Cordy, there's no fair.

[Narrator/Producer]

Their first big campaign was to support the 1982 Immigration Reform and Control Act. As part of that legislative push, Congress held hearings to consider numerical limits of on immigration to the United States. Hardin testified in support of those limits.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Being human, we want to help others, but how many others can we help?

[Narrator/Producer]

In his testimony, Hardin explicitly linked unemployment, congestion, crime and environmental degradation all to immigration.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Each immigrant brings no natural resources, no energy. Despite popular language, people do not produce energy. People can only consume or destroy useful energy.

[Narrator/Producer]

And he calls for absolute limits to immigration and the formation of an office of Population and Immigration.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Central to the deliberations of the population and immigration office would be the concept of carrying capacity, the foundation stone of ecological thinking.

[Narrator/Producer]

Ironically, Hardin ends his anti immigrant message with a warning against the dangers of tribalism. Because for Hardin, increasing diversity would necessarily create conflict. Coming out of those hearings, the Senate did pass a bill that included new numerical caps to some immigration pathways. But the bill was defeated in the house.

[Gordon Caddick]

The defeated 1982 bill laid the groundwork for future legislation, though specifically the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. FAIR was instrumental in developing enforcement mechanisms within the bill.

[Narrator/Producer]

Still, FAIR didn't get all they wanted. The bill was seen as a compromise between immigration doves and immigration hawks. And most galling to immigration hawks, the bill provided amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

[Gordon Caddick]

1986 was another auspicious year in American history. It was the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan administration was restoring the statue and they planned a massive four day celebration, something they called Liberty Weekend.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Tonight it begins as ABC presents Liberty Weekend. Dark for the past two years, the.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

Ladies torch will be relighted by the President.

[Gordon Caddick]

Peter Jennings and ABC News gave Liberty Weekend wall to wall coverage as did many other networks because this was a star studded event. Shirley MacLaine, Neil Diamond, Gregory Pegg, Elizabeth.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Taylor, Debbie Allen, Mikhail Baryshnikov and more as the salute to Lady Liberty Star swizzers gala opening ceremonies. Now from Governor's Island, Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters. Just about 1700 yards across this upper bay from the stage, you can see her, the Statue of Liberty about to be relit by President Reagan in all of her new glory.

[Gordon Caddick]

In the lead up to this big party, Cordelia May spent months trying to get the statue's famous inscription removed. You know those words by Emma Lazarus. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

[Miroslava Chavez Garcia]

He's like, no, we shouldn't take care of them. They should stay home. And if you know they can't survive, that's because they've exceeded their own carrying capacity.

[Gordon Caddick]

But Cordelia May failed in her efforts to get the poem removed. In fact, on that 1986 broadcast, the words of Emma Lazarus actually figured quite prominently.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

[Gordon Caddick]

That's the actor Charlton Heston reading the poem for abc.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Send these. The homeless tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

[Gordon Caddick]

Liberty Weekend was basically a celebration of American American immigration. Like they gave up medals to naturalized citizens, and as Robert De Niro explained, they even turned Ellis island itself into a court, a place to do a citizenship ceremony.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

People have gathered here, as they have in 44 other cities, to prepare for one of the most meaningful moments of their lives. They come to take the oath of citizenship that will make them full fledged Americans. The Honorable, the Chief justice of the United States. Oh yay, oh yay. Oh yea. All persons having business before the Honorable, the Chief justice of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention. Now it is my honor and privilege to ask each of you who seek citizenship to raise your right hand.

[Gordon Caddick]

And.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

On this Bible, repeat after me. I hereby declare on.

[Gordon Caddick]

On live TV, aided by satellite link to 44 other cities, Chief Justice Berger administered the oath of citizenship to 13,000 new American citizens with liberty and justice for all.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Honorable court is now adjourned.

[Gordon Caddick]

The events of that day are a testament to Hardin's failure. There isn't one big numerical cap on immigration, and there certainly isn't a population control office informed by the idea of carrying capacity. So even during the hard right turn of the Reagan era, Hardin's ideas proved too extreme. So in his eyes, he failed. After 1986, Tanton and Hardin moved even harder to the right, or they were just more open about it. In 1990, Tanton started publishing the openly ethno nationalist journal Social Contract. Hardin was a frequent contributor.

[Narrator/Producer]

Throughout the 90s, Hardin said many extremely racist things. He warned of a passive genocide against the white race. He signs onto a letter that claims Black children are less intelligent than white children. And he argued that multiculturalism is a disaster.

[Gordon Caddick]

By this point, the mask had totally slipped. This story has been about how Gerrit Hardin and his ideas helped shape a number of ideologically heterodox alliances. Alliances between movements for women's liberation and eugenicists who merely saw women as irresponsible breeders. Alliances between conservationists outraged by pollution and nativists concerned with the racial purity of the nation state. And alliances between environmental radicals railing against overconsumption and eco conservatives who saw the solution in privatizing the commons.

[Narrator/Producer]

These alliances held steady for many years, partly because Hardin, Tanton and May were so strategic. They presented their messaging in a way that appealed to many progressives. They appeared sensible and evidence based. But still these were incoherent alliances. Alliances that were inherently unstable. So they had to fall apart.

[Gordon Caddick]

The women's movement had already started to disavow Hardin and the other population control advocates by the mid to late 70s. Around that time, the press documented a number of disturbing stories of forced sterilizations. These stories just made it obvious population control and women's liberation are not the same thing.

[Narrator/Producer]

And in the 80s and 90s, the environmental movement would also break from Hardin. From 1989 to 1996, the Sierra Club's official position was to greatly limit migration. For hardness reasons, Hardin pushed the Club to continue their anti immigrant position. But instead they pulled back. They took a neutral position on immigration. Hardin was incensed. He told them that the tragedy of the commons should have made it clear to them. Allowing immigration would be to create an unmanaged commons. But the Sierra Club stood firm to their position. They ignored Hardin's bleak vision.

[Gordon Caddick]

Hardin had a lifetime membership to the Sierra Club. He had even served on some of their committees. But this just wasn't his club anymore. It's an example of how much his stock had fallen. Hardin was no longer a darling of the environmental movement.

[Narrator/Producer]

Later in life, Hardin became increasingly frail on account of post polio syndrome. He also suffered from a heart disorder and his wife became afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease.

[Gordon Caddick]

One of their convictions was the right to die. Hardin and his wife were members of the Hemlock Society, which advocated for assisted suicide.

[Narrator/Producer]

It was a conviction they stood firm on. Hardin believed that humans were deserving of a quick, pain free death, just like the hundreds of chickens he slaughtered as a child. He and his wife died by suicide in their home in 2003.

[Gordon Caddick]

Two years later, Garrett Hardin's friend Cordelia S. May would do the same. In 2005, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she ended her own life. She was 76 years old. John Tanton was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2003. He passed away in 2019 of natural causes. After Hardin's death, the UCSB issued a statement honoring him. And his faculty page continued to list his many accomplishments and including a major award that the UC system gave him in 1997 before his death. But eventually that faculty page would change, partly because people start to realize the tragedy of the Commons is just wrong.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

The entire six page essay is riddled with errors, with very obvious holes in the argument. But one of them is he doesn't address, he doesn't have anything useful to say about any of the histories involved.

[Gordon Caddick]

Again, Peter Stoudenmaier, a historian, not a biologist. Stoudenmaier tells us that Hardin understood nothing about environmental history.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

You might say that's not his job. Hardin was a biologist. He wasn't a historian, he wasn't a philosopher, he wasn't an. He was a biologist, okay? In any case, he just doesn't address that history. He doesn't address the actual history of the Commons in England or anywhere else. What he especially misses is the ways in which actual commons actually operate, both historically and today. There are thousands of examples of that. That's not, I'm not exaggerating for a fact, I really mean that. There are thousands of examples of real world commons, historically and today, that have been studied, that have been scrutinized, that have generated a very large body of research, and they look absolutely nothing whatsoever like the scenario that hardin imagined in 1968. The probably most important and in the world of mainstream scholarship, most respected and most acknowledged body of critique emerged in the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. It's by Eleanor Ostrom.

[Gordon Caddick]

When the political scientist Eleanor Ostrom read the Tragedy of the Commons, she was not impressed. As she recounted during a 2011 talk at UC San Diego, when Gert Hardin.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Published his paper in Science in 1968 on the tragedy the Commons, I thought, gee, he has just made this up as he talked. Well, he talked. Imagine a pasture open to anyone. It wasn't here's my data. It is imagine a pasture open.

[Gordon Caddick]

Ostrom would eventually prove that Hardin's imagined pasture wasn't real. It was just a fantasy. She also took issue with Hardin's very nice, narrow economistic definition of human rationality. He saw all of us as self interested utility maximizers who had these inescapable appetites because of that view of humanity. This led him to the inevitable conclusion that we'd trash our commons.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

Well, that became almost like a religion. And the presumption was that humans were helpless and that they had to have a government tell them how to do this and take over or make it private, privateize it. But an external authority had to come in and do it, as if the external authority had people in it who had different gen.

[Narrator/Producer]

In some ways, Ostrom had a similar childhood to Hardin. She also lived through the Great Depression and with modest means, but she didn't learn her lessons. On an isolated family farm in Missouri, Ostrom grew up in Los Angeles. She tilled a victory garden, knit scarves for troops, and bought her clothes at a charity store. This imbued her with very different ideals, like cooperation. Then she entered a profoundly sexist educational system. She was discouraged from studying math and even from entering college altogether.

[Gordon Caddick]

So she was an academic outsider. And her ideas didn't come from inside the lab. They came from the community.

[Narrator/Producer]

Like her PhD dissertation in political science studied how communities in Los Angeles managed their shared water resources. She found that small associations of users were more effective than large corporate or governmental actors.

[Gordon Caddick]

That kind of work would define Ostrom's career. She realized that scholars from a diverse set of disciplines had created a rich tapestry of case studies, case studies of how groups of people manage their common resources. So Ostrom and her colleagues decided to look at them closely. In a 2010 lecture, she provides an overview of this overwhelming body of research.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

We finally were able to code 47 irrigation systems all over the world, and. And 44 inshore fisheries all over the world. Then we've studied irrigation systems in Nepal. We've gotten up to over 250 systems that we have studied. We're now over 250 forests. We're in 11 countries, and just added China and Ethiopia.

[Gordon Caddick]

When Ostrom looked at these communities, she saw that they had developed these sophisticated rules, customs, and traditions. They had created a kind of collective rationality through their collective labor. They had found ways to solve shared problems. And in case study after case study, Ostrom showed that these small, local communities of workers tended to be more efficient than sophisticated centralized systems. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes their idiosyncratic methods of managing the commons didn't work, but they often did. So the takeaway is there's no iron law, no inescapable tragedy. We are not just animals trapped by instincts. In other words, nobody needs to come in and manage our commons. We have ways to do it together.

[Narrator/Producer]

For that, Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, six years after Gert Arden's death.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

In its 271st year, the Royal Swedish.

[Gordon Caddick]

Academy of Sciences could not have awarded.

[Narrator/Producer]

A more timely prize.

[Gordon Caddick]

May I ask you please to come.

[Narrator/Producer]

Forward and receive the prize from the.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor, interview clips)]

Hands of His Majesty the King?

[Gordon Caddick]

There's a kind of whiggish history that one could tell about Gerrit Hardin. He's just this irredeemable villain, and when environmentalists finally discovered who he really was, they expelled him. Now everything is better. There's some truth to that, but I think that would dramatically oversimplify our story. To just condemn Hardin would be to avoid a much more difficult and much more important why was he a darling of the environmental movement? Why is he one of the most cited scholars ever? I don't think it's because he just tricked everyone. I think it's because his way of seeing the world was endemic to early environmentalism. And in some ways it still is. Hardin is like many of the green dreamers in this series. He's a brilliant thinker who takes an idea and pushes it dogmatically towards its logical conclusion. But is that too generous? Maybe he's just a cynical operator and all these biological models that I've been talking about are just a kind of veneer over his hideous politics. Given how strategic he was throughout this story, that makes some sense. So what is it? Is this a tragic tale of dogmatic expertise gone wrong? Or is this just another far right actor looking for intellectual justification for bigotry? The truth is, it's obviously both, because Hardin's particular scientific paradigm was shaped by the racist, classist, sexist and nationalistic assumptions of the time. It's a paradigm that had obvious problems. You just had to look at the world as it actually was. That's what Elinor Ostrom showed us. Now, Hardin was smart enough. He could have realized that his tragedy was a mistake. But then he'd have to give up something. He just couldn't give up his position in the hierarchy. The hierarchy of race, class, gender, nationality, and perhaps most of all, the hierarchy of expert authority. Now, obviously, Ostrom was an expert too, but because of the sexism that she faced, she was a kind of outsider expert. Maybe that's why her work always looked to other outsiders. Maybe that's why she noticed their expertise. Hardin came from a very different place. He was celebrated as a brilliant intellectual in an event environmental movement that had been very much dominated by brilliant intellectuals. From their armchairs and their laboratories, they confidently developed their own Ecological models. Turns out these models were green nightmares. And Hardin would say as much. He'd say, this isn't pretty. I don't relish these dire conclusions. And to tell you the truth, I actually believe him. I don't think this was the most enjoyable way of seeing the world. But still, there had to have been a cold comfort in it, because in this green nightmare, it was only the wise expert who could save us from ourselves. That's an idea that Gerrit Harden just couldn't give up.

[Narrator/Producer]

But finally, we've given up on Gerhardt Hardin. Let's go back to that UCSB faculty page we mentioned. As late as 2019, it just listed plaudits. But by 2023, all his plaudits are gone. Now his page just includes a short statement. It reads, in part, garrett Hardin openly supported policies that would restrict immigration, promote racial segregation, and facilitate the sterilization of people of color and disabled persons. For these reasons, the Environmental Studies Program finds Hardin's ideas to be morally repugnant and ethically reprehensible. They add. His name, photo and bio on the program's website are maintained because to censor or erase his presence would be to deny the role he has played in promoting ideas that have been highly influential among environmental studies scholars and movement leaders.

[Gordon Caddick]

As climate change accelerates, Hardin's ideas are coming back, especially on the right now. When you think of the American right and climate, you're probably frustrated by their denialism. But after you hear what we're about to tell you, you might wish that they stayed denialists because Tanton, May and Hardin, even though they've come and gone, they've formed the intellectual basis for a far right environmentalism.

[Narrator/Producer]

Throughout the 80s and 90s, John Tanton spoke more and more about how climate change would destroy the United States. He even created a spinoff think tank that published a number of reports linking carbon emissions to immigration.

[Gordon Caddick]

It's a reminder that this ideologically scrambled way of thinking that we've been talking about, it just isn't going away.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

The one thing I would really emphasize, and I say this because I've just encountered so many people in the environmental movement and so many people on the left who don't believe it when I say it, John Tanton was a real environmentalist. John and Mary Lou both. His wife was named Mary Lou Tanton. They were for real people. They weren't faking it. They weren't pretending to be environmentalists so that they could then get in better with somebody or other. So that they could then you know, make better headway with, with liberals and centrists or something. It was not a scam, it was not an environmentalist veneer to cover up their true anti immigrant colors. John Tanton was an anti immigrant fanatic and a genuine and fully committed environmentalist. It is imperative that we understand that.

[Gordon Caddick]

The bleeding edge of right wing politics is past climate denialism. Today, fair, the group that Tanton once led, their ideas have become central to the Trump administration. Yes, Donald Trump and the MEGA base frequently call climate change a hoax. But the intellectual architects of his anti immigrant politics don't all make those claims. Actually, just the opposite. Climate change and environmental degradation have become key justifications to shut the border borders. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's anti immigration policy. He is a longtime FAIR ally. Tucker Carlson also frequently cites their research and he often talks about the country's environmental challenges. So does Richard Spencer. And a recent study of the neo Nazi website stormfront found that 70% of the most substantive posts either accepted or exploited the threat of climate change. That is all documented in a ProPublica piece from last year called the Ghosts of John Tanton. This is blood and soil. Environmentalism and climate change is being used to justify mass murder.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

The two obvious ones are the Christchurch perpetrator in 2019 and then the El Paso perpetrator a few months later. Neither one of them cited Hardin by name, but the ideas are just unmistakable. The very first words of the Christchurch perpetrators manifesto are it's the birth rates, it's the birth rates, it's the birth rates. The El Paso perpetrators manifesto was all about the invaders. And if we can get rid of the invaders, then our environment, quote, our environment will be saved.

[Gordon Caddick]

The El Paso shooter called his manifesto the Inconvenient Truth. It really was an environmental manifesto. He railed against megacorporations, waste, pollution, urban sprawl. But most of all, he railed against immigrants. He wrote that if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become sustainable.

[Peter Stoutenmaier]

People like me have been writing about this stuff since the 1990s. We've been saying there's a tradition of right wing ecology. It's been there all along. The rest of y' all should pay attention to it. I've been saying that forever. And you know, for most of that time, for much of that time, thankfully, the stuff that I studied was marginal. So if people didn't pay a lot of attention to what I wrote about it, big freaking deal. From 2019 onwards, nobody can say that anymore. When these guys go out and shoot dozens of people kill dozens of people. We need to start taking that tradition seriously. We can't blame that sort of thing on one particular thinker. You can't say that those acts were John Tanton's fault or Garrett Hardin's fault. That's vastly oversimplified. But we do need to understand the real world consequences of a set of.

[Gordon Caddick]

Ideas like these as our environment gets worse and worse. Hardin offers a simple cut off aid, put up border walls and deport people of color. When I look around, it seems like that green nightmare is becoming more and more like our reality. So we have to decide, what kind of model of humanity do we want to believe in? Are we forever trapped in conflict over our environment because of some inevitability encoded into our biology? Or are we rational, conscientious, collaborative and imaginative? Can we collectively author a more environmentally just future? Garrett Hardin believed that we couldn't, but I'd hope that you believe we can and that's it for this episode of Green Dreams. The lead producers on this episode were Alec Opperman and me, Gordon Caddick, with additional editing from AC Rowe. Our technical producer is Jay Coburn, Dakota Koop is our graphic designer and Cited's theme song was composed by Mike Barber. On this episode we heard from Miroslava Chavez Garcia, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Peter Stoudenmaier, a historian at Marquette University. I also want to thank Richard Haims and Alex Roberts. They were both very helpful to this piece. They are authors of the Rise of Climate Change and the Far Right. Two other work were really key in helping us conceptualize this episode, the Malthusian Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. That's by Thomas Robertson. And the article Garrett Hardin's Tragic Sense of Life that's in Endeavor and it's written by the philosopher Jason Oakes. I recommend all of these works and I will link them in the show. Notes Cited is a project in collaborative academic academic journalism that means we partner scholars, students, and journalists together in production. On this episode and on this series, we had consulting from Professors Emer Zieman and Tanner Murlies. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding to support this partnership. My own time was also underwritten in part by a grant from Mitax Canada. For more and for a complete list of credits, visit the series page to Green Dreams. You can find [e-mail] and linked in the show Notes. Thanks for listening. This has been a production of Sighted Media, the academic podcasting company for more.

[Garrett Hardin (voice actor)]

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