by acting selfishly instead of thinking about the greater good as a whole.
Now this can be applied to many aspects of life, but some of the most common shared resources are
food supplies, land, and water. These things may seem like general topics and its true that they
are, but they are among the most used daily.
Lets take food for example, think about how much food an average person consumes every day. Then think
about how much food we buy at the store every week.Factor in how many times we go out to eat. With all
those numbers we can start to see that some food is going to be wasted there. How much depends on the
individual or family, but no matter how small that number gets multiplied exponentially because its not
just one person or family wasting food.Its a whole world of people throwing away food. Everyone knows
there are starving kids in Africa as well as somewhere in your local community. All that food that
you waste or that everyone else wastes could have been used to feed them, but we selfishly bought too
much and didn't eat it so we just threw it away.
The first thing we think about wasting isnt land, but you would be surprised. So many companies buy up
land just because they think it will be profitable one day and just sit on it for years. This land could
be used for so many things from new housing to a school. They only think about lining their pockets and
not what is best for the people that want something on that land. Along with that, some housing, like that
in Arizona, is spread out wide and far. This seems like a nice thing because we arent too close to our
neighbors that we can hear them through the walls, but its such a waste of land. Build up and having
multilevel-ed housing is very economical, but it does come with costs.
Water is the most precious resource we as humans have. It is renewable, but that takes time and it is
becoming harder and harder to keep water in the areas needed. Think about all the water we waste everyday.
We run dishwashers, washing machines, take showers, wash dishes, water the lawn and wash our cars. That
is a lot of water to be just throwing away. Those of us in the desert should be more appreciative of the
amount of water we actually have, but we seem to waste water even more just because we can. Taking long
showers or taking forever to brush our teeth. Water is so important to survival and we treat it like it
comes from a bottomless well filled with fresh water.
There are so many more examples of ways that we as people, society and a world waste our precious resources
out of selfish tendencies. If we want even a small amount of the life we have now, we have to start thinking
ahead. If we continue on this path of needless wasting, then we may run out of these resources that we
have grown so attached to. If it helps, think about what life would be like without clean water, gas to run
our cars, or enough food to make it through the week. We are the only ones that can act and we have to act fast,
or there will be nothing left to waste besides time.
Excellent examples of Tragedy of the Commons. This seems like a really thoughtful post. But what about critiques of Tragedy of the Commons?
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