Water is necessary for all complex life on Earth, from plants which use its molecules to synthesize energy from sun rays, to animal cells which use water molecules to repair more complex organic structures like DNA. In addition to drinking it, humans use water for sanitation, hygienics and agricultural irrigation. The multifarious and humanitarian uses for water make it especially alarming that water privatization has sharply increased in the past decades while groundwater levels have sharply decreased in some areas. , While some see privatization as a solution to the collective action problems common to many finite natural resources, privatization poses specific issues for water due to its life-sustaining abilities. In this essay I will
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He uses the example of cattle grazing in a public pasture. Each cattle owner will profit if they add another cattle to the pasture, however adding cattle also decreases the grazing quality of the pasture slightly due to the added burden of another animal. Therefore, every individual is greatly incentivized to add a single cattle which only slightly incentivized to maintain the ecological viability of the pasture. The resulting continuous growth of the number of animals in the pasture due to these incentives causes the pasture to degrade to the point that it can sustain even fewer cattle than previously. This degradation of natural resources, Hardin claims, is caused by an inability of the farmers to maximize two different variables. They cannot maximize both profit and resource efficiency, and since capitalism as an economic system favors actors who make profit, those who choose resource efficiency go out of business more often than those who maximize …show more content…
In these cases, the appropriators, or first claimants would receive all the water they were legally entitled to before the other claimants received any. This system is problematic because it favors private corporations, like Nestle, with the legal and financial power to acquire these rights over small farmers who could only acquire such rights by birth. In the United States, the “legal system vests the primary control of water rights in individuals, organizations, and special use entities, and not the public at large.” This means that the state and federal governments have little ability to divert water use to what would engender the most public
He uses the example of cattle grazing in a public pasture. Each cattle owner will profit if they add another cattle to the pasture, however adding cattle also decreases the grazing quality of the pasture slightly due to the added burden of another animal. Therefore, every individual is greatly incentivized to add a single cattle which only slightly incentivized to maintain the ecological viability of the pasture. The resulting continuous growth of the number of animals in the pasture due to these incentives causes the pasture to degrade to the point that it can sustain even fewer cattle than previously. This degradation of natural resources, Hardin claims, is caused by an inability of the farmers to maximize two different variables. They cannot maximize both profit and resource efficiency, and since capitalism as an economic system favors actors who make profit, those who choose resource efficiency go out of business more often than those who maximize …show more content…
In these cases, the appropriators, or first claimants would receive all the water they were legally entitled to before the other claimants received any. This system is problematic because it favors private corporations, like Nestle, with the legal and financial power to acquire these rights over small farmers who could only acquire such rights by birth. In the United States, the “legal system vests the primary control of water rights in individuals, organizations, and special use entities, and not the public at large.” This means that the state and federal governments have little ability to divert water use to what would engender the most public