This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons

This Is Also A Story About The Tragedy Of The Commons. 

November 23, 2022

Nobody can live up to the ideal of moral purity held by any group.  The point of having ideals is to act as correct as possible in every situation, not only when it's convenient.  When it comes to animal rights for example, the point is not to start all being vegan and liberate all animals held in captivity.  It's not false that it's from owning livestock and domesticated animals that the notion of death being a part of life entered human consciousness in the long ago.  Some uncomfortable but true philosophical arguments place the origin of executive authority theories in the politics of the sheep-fold and the slaughterhouse.  The point of animal rights discourses is to improve the conditions of life for domesticated animals.  There's a lot of weird facts about animal domestication that problematize our discourse about nature and our relationship with the natural world.  Several species of rabbit were transplanted to Australia to be hunted in the wild, but having no natural predators, outran their bounds and denuded the landscape.  Parts of Australia were made a desert by these imported rabbits.  The comparison between European rabbits and the European settlers is besides the point I am making now.  No amount of hunting could control the imported rabbit population, and now the government tries to control the rabbit population thru' their infection with rare and novel diseases.  It was a thoughtless sort of quasi-domestication that caused Australia's rabbit problem in the first place.  But now there's a paradox.  It would be thoughtless to allow the population of imported European rabbits to multiply unchecked (and it's thoughtless to imagine that that would be some sort of idyll or Eden for rabbits), but, it is equally thoughtless to be infecting them with diseases just to control their population.  And it's not beside the point that germ warfare as is now used against the rabbits was introduced to the region by the germ warfare used by belligerents in the Pacific Theater of WWII.  It was reported many times to have been used by the Japanese against Chinese cities, but the use of germ warfare against the European rabbits of Australia corroborates reports that the Allies used germ warfare too.  A common refrain that you will hear when you look into things is that the facts of the world are complicated. Australia's rabbits tell a story about the ecological consequences of transplanting ideologies.  But they tell a story about simple human thoughtlessness, too.  This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons.