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The threats posed by climate change and overexploitation of the oceans are already being felt. All will be affected, none more so than the poorest costal and island populations. With the crisis in our oceans and its devastating ecological consequences now abundantly clear, global solutions are needed.

Overfishing, rising sea levels, huge dead zones, and waste plastic in the ocean: these are hard facts, generated from sound data brought together by renowned marine scientists from across the world and available internationally. Experts, relying on ever-improving digital measurement methods and imaging techniques, are extremely concerned and warn of a scenario that affects everyone. It is beyond dispute: our oceans are in crisis.

“We! Will! Die!” ran the headline in Jakob Augstein’s political column in the German current affairs magazine, Der Spiegel, in November 2017 following the UN climate summit in Bonn, chaired by Fiji. “It was good of the UN to pass the baton to the islanders before they sink”, Augstein continued. “Previously, when something could actually still have been done about rising sea levels, nobody would have thought to ask Fijians what they thought. There were more important things to think about, like cars, jobs, fridges… ourselves, really. And it’s not like Mallorca is going to sink. Not yet, anyway.”

Waves of concern: the consequences of climate change

The seas are suffering due to climate change. Scientists consider acidification, sea warming, and rising sea levels to be the three biggest problems we are facing. The main cause of climate change is CO₂ released by humanity into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. As the ocean absorbs too much CO₂ it gradually becomes acidic, while increasing temperatures push sea levels up and cause huge changes to marine ecosystems.

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The Fisherman and the Farmer – A Tale About Overexploitation

May 11, 2018

The Fisherman and the Farmer – A Tale About Overexploitation

Ilaria Perissi and Nicola Calisi playing the fisherman and his wife in a theatrical piece shown in Florence in 2017. The piece was based on the story told below (text by Ugo Bardi). The origin of this story is told here.

Once upon a time, a fisherman who lived on the shore of the lake went to visit his cousin, a farmer, who lived in the countryside.

“Cousin,” said the fisherman, “I am glad to see you and that God blessed you with a good wife and many children. But I also see that your children are thin, and they look hungry, and the same is true for your wife. I am sad at seeing that, cousin. Why don’t you make bread for your children with the grain that I saw you keep in the granary? Don’t you trust God to provide for you in the future? I can tell you that God gives me abundant fish from the lake where I fish, and my good wife and my children don’t starve.”

“Cousin,” said the farmer, “I am glad to see you, too, and I am sure that God blessed you in giving you abundant fish so that your wife and your children do not starve. But you are right when you say that my children are hungry, and it is true that we haven’t had much bread to eat. But the land sometimes gives us plenty and sometimes not so much. This year, times were more difficult than usual and the harvest was not so good as I hoped it would be. Yet, I must follow the rules that my father followed, and my grandfather before him followed, and the ancient fathers of all of us followed.

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Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

July 29, 2015

Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

Image by James Good

Garrett Hardin’s idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons” has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; that is the interplay of individual advantage versus public goods; the basic factor that leads to what we call “overexploitation.”

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hardin used the example of sheep and pastures to explain the reasons of the tragedy, but that’s rather unfamiliar to my students (as well as to most of us). For instance, many of my students don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of “overgrazing”, that is the fact that grass doesn’t regrow if it is grazed too much. Besides, the pastures that Hardin was considering never experienced the “tragedy”; they were well managed and well regulated, specifically in order to avoid it.

So, let me propose a different example for the mechanism of overexploitation, based on a real event that happened to me. Maybe it can explain the concept better.

Just a few days ago I was literally kidnapped inside an underground parking in Florence because I had lost my entrance ticket, with the employees of the place insisting that they won’t let me out unless I was willing to shell out 237 euros for about two hours of parking (!!).

I described the experience in detail in a post in Italian, that you may machine translate if you are really interested. The gist of the story, anyway, is that I found myself caught in a trap mainly designed to siphon out some money out of the pockets of the hapless foreign tourist passing by. In my case, I was able to negotiate my release and avoid paying the exorbitant surcharge.
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Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

July 21, 2015

Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

We live in an era of ecological crisis, which is a direct result of human actions. Natural scientists have been debating whether the current historical epoch should be called the Anthropocene, in order to mark the period in which human activities became the primary driver of global ecological change.^[1]

Initially, it was proposed that this new epoch, corresponding with the rise of modern capitalist and industrial development, began in the eighteenth century. The growth imperative of capitalism, as well as other sociocultural changes, is a primary factor generating major environmental problems that culminate in ecological crisis.^[2]

It has become increasingly clear that humans face an existential crisis. The environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben explains:

Earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived…. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet…. This is one of those rare moments, the start of a change far larger and more thoroughgoing than anything we can read in the records of man, on a par with the biggest dangers we can read in the records of rock and ice.^[3]

Many modern ecological problems are referred to as a tragedy of the commons, a concept developed by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s to describe the overexploitation or despoliation of natural resources.^[4]We contend that they are actually associated with the tragedy of the commodity.

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