Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos (Paperback)

by Garrett Hardin (Author)
Key Phrases: human exemptionism, major default position, benign demographic transition, United States, Entangling Alliances, Biting the Bullet (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"We have but one world; we should be careful with it. Anyone who agrees will love this book, whose every page is almost too full of important facts and wise arguments....Hardin has given us the altruistic 'warning call' of the prophet with a dangerous message--dangerous to give and dangerous to ignore. Somewhere he should get a genetic reward."--EES Newsletter
"A wide-rainging and eclectic presentation....It is also an excelletn resource for those teaching high school and college students about human-ecosystem interactions. In truth, this is a helpful guide for all of us as we recognize the problem of overpopulation and start learning to live within the earth's limits. With Hardin's help, perhaps we can begin to envision a sustainable future for a stable population."--Electronic Green Journal
"Living Within Limits is a sophisticated attack on immigration that spans philosophical and sociological arguments."--he Public Eye
"Garrett Hardin is...a fearless and original thinker. Living Within Limits is very welcome. Hardin is tireless in his crusade to make us face up to ecological realities, especially our seeming inability to confront the most serious long-term problem, overpopulation."--New Scientist
"This is an outstanding volume on population issues - the most important issues facing humanity today."--Payson Sheets, University of Colorado


Product Description
"We fail to mandate economic sanity," writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them.

In Living Within Limits, Hardin focuses on the neglected problem of overpopulation, making a forceful case for dramatically changing the way we live in and manage our world. Our world itself, he writes, is in the dilemma of the lifeboat: it can only hold a certain number of people before it sinks--not everyone can be saved. The old idea of progress and limitless growth misses the point that the earth (and each part of it) has a limited carrying capacity; sentimentality should not cloud our ability to take necessary steps to limit population. But Hardin refutes the notion that goodwill and voluntary restraints will be enough. Instead, nations where population is growing must suffer the consequences alone. Too often, he writes, we operate on the faulty principle of shared costs matched with private profits. In Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," he showed how a village common pasture suffers from overgrazing because each villager puts as many cattle on it as possible--since the costs of grazing are shared by everyone, but the profits go to the individual. The metaphor applies to global ecology, he argues, making a powerful case for closed borders and an end to immigration from poor nations to rich ones. "The production of human beings is the result of very localized human actions; corrective action must be local....Globalizing the 'population problem' would only ensure that it would never be solved." Hardin does not shrink from the startling implications of his argument, as he criticizes the shipment of food to overpopulated regions and asserts that coercion in population control is inevitable. But he also proposes a free flow of information across boundaries, to allow each state to help itself.

"The time-honored practice of pollute and move on is no longer acceptable," Hardin tells us. We now fill the globe, and we have no where else to go. In this powerful book, one of our leading ecological philosophers points out the hard choices we must make--and the solutions we have been afraid to consider.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Paper edition (April 6, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195093852
• ISBN-13: 978-0195093858
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #486,961 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garrett Hardin and the Freedom of Limits, August 21, 2005

By	Tom Andres (CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is essential reading. As someone lucky enough to have called Garrett Hardin my friend, I was once with him at one of his book signings in Santa Barbara, California. As two rather prosperous looking young women rushed by his display table, one said to the other: "`Limits'--I don't like it!" After which Hardin turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and said, "You see, she just summarized my whole problem." But one of the things that Professor Hardin is still teaching us, through his books and his students, is that once we accept the fact that the world has real ecological limits--for example, we stop assuming that we can cram a quarter-billion people into America, or that affordable substitutes for finite resources like oil and topsoil will be generated magically by the marketplace--the quality of our lives will actually improve. It is something like the little boy who has many scattered ambitions, from cowboy to Superman, upon reaching maturity being able to focus in on the adventure of passionately pursuing life's real possibilities. In his own life Hardin was anything but grim. Garrett Hardin just wanted to help our society grow up and, as said in Corinthians, put away childish things.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A marvellous book distinguished by Hardin's superb clarity of thought, June 19, 2007

By	Andrew Barrett (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

1st edition, reissued (1995), 311 pages

This is another of the twenty books that Charlie Munger recommends in the 2nd edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack (which I cannot recommend more highly). When a very widely read and highly effective thinker like Munger gets to eighty years old and recommends a list of just twenty books, I think one would be justified in expecting all of them to be pretty good.

Even so, as I make my way through his list I find myself pleasantly surprised at just how good some of them are. The clarity of thought Hardin demonstrates in this book is simply superb.

There is an important difference comparing this book to most others. Because so much of his subject matter (the subtitle is: `Ecology, Economics and Population Taboos') is smeared over by taboo and emotion, Hardin appears to have decided that in order to deal with this problem he also needs to demonstrate how to think properly.

Thus it is really two books in one: a manual on how to think effectively and a treatise on his chosen subject. For example, he hammers home the importance of default positions to provide the foundation for critical judgement (in economics: there's no such thing as a free lunch; in psychology: reward determines behaviour; in ecology: and then what?).

I am left with a feeling of gratitude towards both Munger and Hardin - without either of whom I would not have read this marvellous book.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To the Point, May 11, 2000

By	Adam DeShong (Indiana) - See all my reviews

A book about population and worldly limits would be uninteresting, most people would say. Not so about this book. Garrett Hardin puts it strait to the point, with no bull or flowery language. This is good especially for me, because science is not particularly my strongest area of intrest. The author puts the scientific facts in everyday language. In this book Mr. Hardin exaust every possibility for counter theories on population growth. I recommend this book to anyone that will be living in the next century. I feel it almost to be a duty to know what is in store for this planet if kept at this current pace.