Bowen Bulletin

Elinor Ostrom just won the Nobel Prize for economics. If this momentous occasion slipped by without you taking much notice, I’m sure that you weren’t alone. But Elinor is a radical. She has rocked the world of economic theory by showing how people are not just units of consumption, taking as much as they can and giving back as little as possible. She studied groups from the herdsmen of Mongolia to the farmers of Spain to see how small groups successfully managed common resources, whether the resource was grassland or irrigation water. The work she did produced insights that apply very directly to each of us on Bowen.

For us the lessons may not lie in how to share resources, but they can help us to deal with a problem of our common creation, garbage. Whether it’s the wrapper off our toilet paper or a worn out mattress we all make contributions to the degradation of our planet every day of our lives. We use to think that it wasn’t a very big deal. Somewhere in the bush we just dug a big hole and buried it. But, as our waste became more toxic with flame retardants and the other miracles of modern technology it became obvious that future generations wouldn’t be digging up the equivalent of terracotta jugs. They would be cursing us for poisoning their groundwater and leaving them with a toxic mess.

In the mid 1970s we stopped burying our garbage and started shipping it to town. Eventually the responsibility for dealing with solid waste shifted from local municipalities to the regional district under the control of the Provincial Ministry of the Environment. But things aren’t working out too well. Finding places to put the garbage created by two million people every day is a fool’s game. The new dumps keep getting further away and the old dumps eventually start to leach out toxins. The time has come to adopt sustainable solutions and that means that the problem has to be dealt with closer to home. The adage is that there is no problem that we cannot solve if we can break it down into small enough pieces and for us, perhaps that means dealing with garbage piece by piece.

In recent years we’ve made great strides in sorting our waste and recycling a greater and greater percentage of it. We’ve every right to be proud of our new recycling depot and the upcoming opening of our thrift store, the Knick Knack Nook, which will help us to reuse many things that would have been bound for the dump. The next step may well be composting all organic waste by mixing kitchen scraps with green waste and processing it locally. We may also look at dismantling manufactured goods so that the component parts can be dealt with more appropriately. Looking at how other communities are handling this problem we see an amazing array of creative solutions. Beside the environmental reasons for doing this there are long-term financial advantages. Metro Vancouver is about to increase again the fees that they charge us to take our garbage. Combine that with the costs we incur picking up garbage and taking it to town and the price tag is approaching $500,000 every year. By Bowen standards that is a pretty significant local industry.

Having identified the problems and opportunities, we have to decide whether or not we are up to the challenge. In some regards we would appear to be the ideal place for such an undertaking. We are a pretty community-minded bunch. Our crime rate is incredibly low, our volunteerism level is very impressive, more of us turn out to vote than almost anywhere else and our support for our recycling depot is fantastic. But would we really put in the time and effort required to properly deal with the garbage we produce?

This is where Elinor’s work comes in. Before she reported on her research the standard models such as “The Tragedy of the Commons” stressed the likelihood that individuals would free load and shirk, basically sabotaging the group actions. But Elinor found eight design principles common to those groups who succeeded in developing the level of trust and reciprocity required to ensure the best outcomes for the group as a whole.

I realize that most of you don’t really follow the work of Nobel Laureates, especially in Economics, but Elinor Ostrom didn’t pontificate about macro economic equations. She looked at numerous examples of how communities of people have worked out effective, straightforward ways of working together for the common good without turning things over to big government. One of the most august and influential bodies in the world abandoned the big ideas and awarded their prize to the thinker who explained why the small ideas work so well.

We live in a community of 3,600 people. Our neighbours, on the other side of the water, live in a community of 2,000,000 people. They need to think big. They need to worry about where they are going to bury their garbage. We don’t, and we certainly don’t need to ship our garbage to them. We need to understand why Elinor deserved her Nobel Prize and realize that we could be the people she’s talking about.

(Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom)