Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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52 politics and governance
deeper storms and currents of the subconscious. And after the
wars, the gulags, and the many killing fi elds of the 20th century,
who can say what demons lurk below the surface of the conscious
mind waiting to march en masse to serve the most heinous causes?
But as James Madison noted long ago, the need for government
originates not in our virtues but in our frailties, faults, and failings.
If men were angels, as he put it, no government would be
necessary. In his later years Madison, who more than anyone else
authored the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, was pessimistic
about the future of the American experiment in democracy. He
believed that under the pressures of sheer geographic size and
population growth it might have a century “before the rot set in”
and democracy came undone (Matthews, 1995, p. 212). But what
are the alternatives to democracy?
In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin published probably the
most famous essay ever to appear in Science magazine, with the
memorable title “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968).
Overpopulation and global environmental problems, Hardin
argued, were analogous to the abuse of the common grazing areas
of medieval England. As long as the costs of abusing the commons
were shared by all and the gains captured by the abuser, the
temptation for any one actor to overgraze and eventually ruin the
commons for all was overwhelming. “Freedom in a commons,”
Hardin wrote, “brings ruin to all.” The only way to escape tragedy
was to increase the collective power to control everyone in
the commons, or as he put it “mutual coercion, mutually agreed
upon.” Economist Robert Heilbroner similarly concluded that
mounting ecological threats to human survival could be managed
only by authoritarian governments, saying “I not only predict
but I prescribe a centralization of power as the only means
by which our threatened and dangerous civilization will make
way for its successor” (Heilbroner, 1980, p.175). Political scientist
William Ophuls concurred, proposing that “ecological scarcity
in particular seems to engender overwhelming pressures toward