A term used to illustrate the conflict between individual interests and the common good, based on the assumption that when individuals use a public good, they do not consider the impact – or externalities – of their use on the good itself; as a result, public resources become overexploited. The term was popularized by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which used a hypothetical example of English Commons, shared plots of grassland used by all livestock farmers in a village. In this hypothetical, each farmer keeps adding more livestock to graze on the Commons, because it costs him nothing to do so. In a few years, the soil is depleted by overgrazing, the Commons becomes unusable, and the village perishes.
Made of highly stable materials which can be used again and again, technical nutrients are designed to be retrieved and reused within the closed-loop cycle of sustainable manufactu...
The three pillars of sustainability are: (i) the society, (ii) the environment, and (iii) the economy. These are also referred to as (i) people, (ii) planet, and (iii) profit, resp...
A way of looking at the way change happens in the world, put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book, The Tipping Point. The book contends that ideas, behaviors, messages...