Tag Archives: Tragedy of the Commons

New Podcast Episode: Lewis & Clark Caverns, Yellowstone National Park, and Our Public Lands

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Entrance to Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park, Montana. Merriwether Lewis’ and William Clark’s expedition never visited these caves: they were not discovered (by whites, anyway) until the later 1800’s. But the expedition did pass nearby, a little further south along the Jefferson River, so the caverns were later named for these intrepid explorers

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

Journal: Billings, Montana, Friday, July 21, 2017

In my idealistic early adulthood, I often lamented how a certain coffee chain, with its weirdly militarist logo of a two-tailed mermaid with a star on her head (the old logo was much better), seemed to crowd out much of the market for charming coffee shops serving Italian style preparations while playing quality music. The more I’ve traveled, however, the more I’ve come to appreciate their ubiquitous clean bathrooms, unlimited wifi, comfortable chairs and tables to write and read at, and dependable coffee.

Especially this morning. I woke up disheveled and a bit cramped: I camped out in the car last night on a pull-out near the road block at the very top of the pass on Beartooth Highway, which runs through the mountains of the Shoshone and Custer-Gallatin National Forests. There’s construction on the road and I made it there too late to get through; they close the top of the pass during the night so that the construction zone can be navigated safely, only in daylight hours. My decision as to where to spend the night, therefore, was made for me: every campground, lodge, and hotel I passed were full. It was too windy to set up my tent in the dark, so I re-made the nice cozy nest in the backseat that I had made the night before to spend the night in Yellowstone. I fell asleep to a spectacularly clear and starry night, and I woke up to this:… Read the written version here

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Lewis & Clark Caverns, Yellowstone National Park, and Our Public Lands

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Entrance to Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park, Montana. Merriwether Lewis’ and William Clark’s expedition never visited these caves: they were not discovered (by whites, anyway) until the later 1800’s. But the expedition did pass nearby, a little further south along the Jefferson River, so the caverns were later named for these intrepid explorers

Journal: Billings, Montana, Friday, July 21, 2017

In my idealistic early adulthood, I often lamented how a certain coffee chain, with its weirdly militarist logo of a two-tailed mermaid with a star on her head (the old logo was much better), seemed to crowd out much of the market for charming coffee shops serving Italian style preparations while playing quality music. The more I’ve traveled, however, the more I’ve come to appreciate their ubiquitous clean bathrooms, unlimited wifi, comfortable chairs and tables to write and read at, and dependable coffee.

Especially this morning. I woke up disheveled and a bit cramped: I camped out in the car last night on a pull-out near the road block at the very top of the pass on Beartooth Highway, which runs through the mountains of the Shoshone and Custer-Gallatin National Forests. There’s construction on the road and I made it there too late to get through; they close the top of the pass during the night so that the construction zone can be navigated safely, only in daylight hours. My decision as to where to spend the night, therefore, was made for me: every campground, lodge, and hotel I passed were full. It was too windy to set up my tent in the dark, so I re-made the nice cozy nest in the backseat that I had made the night before to spend the night in Yellowstone. I fell asleep to a spectacularly clear and starry night, and I woke up to this:

View from Beartooth Highway at the top of the pass on Hwy 12 through Shoshone and Custer-Gallatin National Forests, very near to where I spent the night

So I drove another hour or two until I came to Billings. I found the nearest Starbucks, took a baby-wipe-and-sink bath, brushed my teeth, changed into fresh clothes, and ordered oatmeal and coffee. Now, clean and comfortable, I’ll tell the story of my last two days on the road.

After enjoying my cold beers and a little rest at Lochsa Lodge in the early evening following my Wendover Ridge Hike in the Bitterroot Mountains on Tuesday, July 18th, I drove to Butte, Montana, where I found a cheap but perfectly acceptable motor inn which had, most importantly of all, a bathtub. The hot bath finished the restoration that dipping my arms, head, legs, and feet in the Lochsa River had begun, and I awoke the next morning ready for a long day.

On Wednesday morning, July 19th, I headed for the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park, and on my way, I noticed signs for the Lewis & Clark Caverns. I had heard of them a few times before and that they were well worth seeing. So I followed the signs, and I’m so glad I did. Here’s (some of) what I saw:

The limestone and minerals that make up most of the Caverns are colored in shades of white and gray highlighted here and there with shades of yellow and pale rust. The Paradise Room, the lowest, largest, and most colorful cave in the system, is richly hued mostly in shades of pink and purple. The lighting is carefully designed to show the colors as they would appear in daylight.

In the first of the caves, we noticed that most of the small stalactites and some of the smaller stalagmites were broken. This mangling of this natural wonder occurred in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, when the Caverns were managed and shown to tourists by private entrepreneurs, who charged high prices and allowed visitors to break off pieces as souvenirs of their visits. This is yet one more of the hundreds of examples to show how important the national and state great public parks are. Unfortunately, profit motives and human psychology very often result in short-sighted decisions that cause long term harm, and the tragedy of the commons is revealed in the way some individuals rob the wider community of the opportunity to enjoy the riches nature has to offer unless the people unite to protect, defend, and steward them. Government, in this case as in many others, does provide an invaluable check and balance to the self-centeredness and destructiveness that form parts (but only parts) of human nature.

So I’m with documentarian Ken Burns in his belief that the National Park System (and by extension, every state and regional park system) is America’s best idea. Yellowstone, Niagara Falls, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and countless others of the most awesome, most beautiful, and most rare of the landscapes built by the forces of nature, were despoiled and marred by humans seeking to profit off these wonders regardless of whether their efforts served to protect or destroy them in the long term. Much of the damage is still being repaired if it can be at all, and some of the damage is ongoing and still unresolved as in the case of the great Yosemite Valley in my own California, where heavy car traffic is causing pollution, overcrowding, and wildlife destruction. Even good government fails sometimes, so the public needs to act as a check and balance on that as well. I would recommend that we demand that the National Park System close off Yosemite Valley to private car traffic.

Early Wednesday evening, I arrived at Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world (way to go, America!) and explored many of its wonders, stopping along the way to inquire at every campsite I passed whether a site had opened up. At long last, late in the evening, one did, a tiny RV site where pitching a tent is not permitted. So, I slept in the car. I felt better about that anyway, since as I was about to pull in to park, I watched a tall, thin man in a black shirt and a long black pleated glossy skirt walking slowly and deliberately backwards through my site, like a scene out of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. I’m pretty broad-minded in my opinions of human behavior since I consider the variety and creativity in the human species among the most interesting and often delightful of natural phenomena, but this was a little weird. I let him do his thing undisturbed.

Once he left, I created a cozy sleep space in the backseat with my sleeping bag and camp sleeping pad, additionally padded at one end with my coats, towels, and sweaters, then I stepped outside, sipping from the large bottle of ale I brought with me and leaning on my rental car, looking at the brilliant stars showing between the black silhouettes of the trees. Eventually, a sustained rustle of a large creature of some sort sent me scurrying to my backseat nest. I didn’t fear bears here since the large number of other campers and their fires would keep them at bay, but the strange man had left me just a little spooked, rather to my surprise. So I laid there in the car drinking more of my ale and thinking about the amazing sights I had seen earlier that evening, only a few of which are pictured below:

Fountain Paint Pot, with intense blue above the white surrounded by brilliantly colored microbes and minerals. The water is incredibly clear and you can see the deep opening in the earth from which the water wells up

The sun sinking low over Artist’s Paint Pots, Yellowstone

I watched Old Faithful erupt for several minutes just after sunset.

The next morning, July 2oth, I explored the park. I saw wonder after wonder after wonder! Here are some of them:

Looking at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone from the top of Lower Falls. I see where the park got its name

View of the Lower Falls from the side of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. I didn’t get any successful pictures of the osprey’s nest on a tower of rock near the cliff side, where the mother was guarding and feeding her two young. It was a beautiful sight to see her swoop gracefully through the air and quickly return with wiggling prey. A nature videographer on the overlook kindly let me get a few good views of the action through his camera.

A view of Yellowstone from the road between Tower / Roosevelt Junction and Mammoth Hot Springs. On recommendation, I took a brief trip to Gardiner to get water and a few supplies and to find a nearby campground to return to that night, still having no luck in Yellowstone. On the rise above Gardiner across the river and the valley between, I got these beautiful views of Yellowstone. But when it comes to a campsite, no luck here either! I shrugged my shoulders and returned to the park. Something was bound to work out… the spirit of adventure was and is strong in me, and I don’t care much where I sleep

Roosevelt Arch at the north gate of Yellowstone; I was here last this January and the backdrop was white with snow where it’s now green.

A hillside clothed in brilliant grasses and wildflowers across from the similarly garbed Mt. Washburn, Yellowstone NP

The trail up Mt Washburn, a 3-mile hike which climbs 1,400 feet

See the animals dotting the side of Mt Washburn? I saw so much wildlife up here: elk, horned mountain sheep with their young, birds, and chipmunks.

At the summit of Mt Washburn. My elation is pretty evident in this photo

The setting sun from the trail as I descended Mt Washburn

From the base of Mt Washburn, I readied myself for the drive of undetermined length from Yellowstone, Hwy 212 towards I-90 en route to my next destination via Cooke City-Silver Gate. When I was in Yellowstone in January, I saw a lot of buffalo but hadn’t seen any at all this trip. But as I drove in the dark, my headlights picked up a dark shape off to the side with two glowing eyes. I stopped and put on my hazard lights as a fuzzy, light brown, charmingly ungainly creature appeared, followed by a mother buffalo and two more calves. Over the next fifteen minutes or so, I watched a small herd of buffalo wander onto the road then mill around. Two young males found this a perfect place to tussle and push. Bison social hour was finally ended as an impatient motorist finally decided to clear the road by driving slowly at the herd, honking, until they took fright and scampered off the road. A little further on, I came across another car, pointing in the other direction, with its hazard lights on and its bumper caved in. The driver ruefully confirmed that he had collided with one of the herd, but the stricken animal was nowhere to be seen. Buffalo are hardy creatures, I hope that one recovers from the impact. Later on, my headlights picked up elk, two waddling fat little creatures (marmots?), and a red fox. As you may imagine, I drove particularly slowly after all that.

I drove on, winding up and up and up, until I reached that roadblock I told you about. I gazed at the bright, bright stars awhile, then curled up to sleep.

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Money and Deservingness

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A little while ago, I took part in a discussion about how medical care is paid for. It took a negative turn, as you would expect, since American health care is the world’s most expensive and the medical insurance field is highly dysfunctional. But the complaints were aimed especially at patients, since a couple of people I was talking to were jaded by observing apparent Medi-Cal fraud too many times over the years

I’ve been working in a medical office for nearly a year now, my first job in the medical field, and for the first time am getting a close look at what goes on behind the scenes at a doctor’s office: how many things can go wrong with skin (it’s a dermatologist’s office), how much patients are cheered and made to feel better by the simple act of talking with someone who can perhaps heal them, the complexities of billing and navigating the disparate requirements of insurance companies, the difficulties of receiving adequate medical care when one is disabled or poor, and so on.

The limits on what one can earn while receiving Medi-Cal, a free (to the patient, of course) state-run health care, are quite low, set at only 138% of the federal poverty level. For a state like California, with its relatively high cost of living, those limits are very much a low-ball estimate of what one can actually live on in an average California city. The qualifying limit on the yearly wage for a household of two, for example, is roughly the same as an average year’s rent alone.

Anyway, in the aforementioned conversation, anecdotes were passed around of people who present with Medi-Cal insurance, yet own expensive smartphones (data plans are not cheap, either!), nice clothes, talk about their vacations and nice cars, have tattoos and elaborate salon hairdos, and so on. This, of course, raised the question: how could they afford these things if they’re actually poor enough to qualify for Medi-Cal? Putting aside obvious objections, that they may have purchased those things before losing their jobs or becoming disabled, or that their family and friends supply the ‘luxuries’ as gifts, etc, the implication was that applying for taxpayer-funded health care should be an option of last resort, only after the smartphone is returned and the data contract expired, the nice clothes worn out, the valuable car sold.

One person proposed this solution: those too poor to afford health care insurance and other necessities of life should be given a one-time check. If they choose fritter it away and don’t spend it wisely, let them suffer the consequences. People who are responsible enough to have the money to pay for health care when they need it, should be the ones who get it; the rest are on their own.

I understand the frustration of those fellow conversationalists. We all know people who chronically don’t (can’t?) ‘keep it together’: they don’t (can’t?) get and keep decent jobs; they squander their money on junk food and useless luxuries and cheap trendy things that don’t last more than a season; they date or marry or make babies with ‘losers’ who drain their finances and don’t contribute; they don’t have a savings account for emergencies, and so on. Those habits are maddening, and don’t endear the possessor to those around them. Many of those habits drive their family and friends crazy, and arouse much resentment in others who end up paying the costs.

But I never hear the opposite argument: some people who have the money to pay shouldn’t get the healthcare resources. We know that some people who have money don’t contribute anything of value to society, and even do a lot of harm. There are some who make their money polluting or from sweatshop labor; there are some who are the lazy, spoiled, entitled children of wealthy parents; there are some who defraud their customers or knowingly sell toxic drugs to addicts; and so on. Why should they get to use up valuable, finite healthcare resources, then, if they, too, have lousy habits and are a drain or a bane to society?

So why the discrepancy? Does having money make one, generally, more deserving somehow? I think the discrepancy in our attitudes toward who should get health care, and who should not, reveal what most of us in the United States implicitly, unquestioningly accept, as a core value of American culture. It’s not so much that might makes right. Cash does. If you have the money to pay for something, you not only should get it, you deserve to get it. Period.

It’s not hard to see why we assume that this is so. We are a capitalist society, founded on the values of our country’s Calivinist founders. Money is the reward for our labor, and a sure sign, described as such in earliest Biblical times, of God’s approval. To accept money-as-deservingness as a core value is to encourage hard work, thrift, and innovation. Money is the surest way that a capitalist society automatically rewards its most productive, contributive members; obviously, those who work hard deserve the most money.

And very often, this is the case: doctors and other healthcare professionals, leaders of industry, civil-rights and defense lawyers as well as prosecutors, scientists, judges, professors and leading public intellectuals, and so on, do vastly important work, and they are, justly, well rewarded.

But wait a minute. How about those examples we just considered, of people who have money that don’t work hard or don’t contribute? There are myriad exceptions to the rule that the most deserving get the most money. A money-centric society also encourages theft, cheating, lying, fraud, ‘let-the-buyer-beware’ selling tactics… the list goes on and on.

And how about all those people we know whose work is among the hardest and most contributive, but who don’t make much money? In our country as in much of the world, for example, we are awash in a wealth of ready accessible, super cheap, delicious, quality food, such as the world has never seen before. That’s largely because masses of people work for subsistence wages, often in harsh conditions, for most of their waking hours, for years if not all of their life. In fact, the health and wealth of our society absolutely depend on these people’s labor, since without it, we are all impoverished, and would have little time and energy to expend in innovation, the arts, all the best things society a society produces, without a steady, high quality food supply.

But of course, the wages of field workers are not mostly determined by deservingness in accordance with the importance or value of the work done or the contribution made, and neither are the wages of most people. Wages are determined by supply and demand, or by how easy it is to replace one worker with another. Laboring in a field requires stamina and the will to work, but not education or highly skilled work experience. There are a seemingly endless supply of people who are willing to work in the fields for low wages in order to escape even worse living conditions or starvation, or increase the chances of success in their children’s future. The same conditions determine wages for myriad other areas of work, such as factories, restaurants, in-home and facility care for children and the elderly, and so on. And of course, there are those who did valuable work all their lives, until advances in technology rendered a lifetime of experience and skill useless. The stenographer, the postal worker, the journalist, the machinist, the autoworker, are seeing their jobs replaced by robots, computers, pundits, and overseas low-paid workers, and they are left middle-aged, suddenly unemployable, with large bills and children still demanding they make decent salaries, to start all over again in a job market that doesn’t need them anymore, with depressed wages for the entry-level work they must now accept when and if they can get it.

In contrast, there are those whose work is in demand because the product of their work is desirable, such as luxury goods, but the people who produce them are in short supply. Designers and developers of video games and movies, including violent and misogynistic ones, can make a great deal of money. Same goes for high-end fashion designers, CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, speculative bankers, plastic surgeons, lobbyists, and so on. The product of these people’s work range from the most beneficial, beautiful, and life-enhancing, to the most useless, harmful, and ugly; either way, the work they do can be highly lucrative, since their work is in high demand.

As we can see, the value of money-as-deservingness may originate from some of our best instincts and desires, such as justice in compensation, the liberty to pursue our own goals, and the drive to better the lives of ourselves and our children. But in the real world, things don’t play out that way, not by a long shot. The cynic, the cheat, the liar, the predator, is all too often more adept at making money than the honest, hard worker. The possession of money is not a reliable reflection of character, nor of the actual value of one’s contribution to society.

So as we’ve just seen, money-as-deservingness is deeply problematic at best, and nearly useless at worst. Money is a tool, nothing more, and the fickleness and vaguaries of the market, not worthiness of the work done, mostly determines who get the most.

So to return to the example we opened with: what conclusions should we have reached in our conversation about health care and who should have access to it?

It’s hard to say, exactly. It seems that collective action problems (the tragedy of the commons, for example) are part-and-parcel of every real-world society, and capitalism is one way around them, as it’s an (ideally) impartial, and therefore fair, way of allocating resources. This may solve many efficiency problems, but to my mind, it doesn’t solve a far too many other, even more important problems, including those that arise from our concern with justice, human flourishing, dignity, the value we place on individual human lives, and so on.

And we haven’t even considered the dilemma of how we are to care for people who are not ‘marketable’: constituted in such a way that they can’t contribute in the ways the market rewards: they don’t have the health, mental capacity, or perceived attractiveness that make them likely to get a decent job, even if they are able to try. Do we return to a society that depends only on elective charities to care for them, reneging on the commitment we’ve made over the years to take their care on as a collective responsibility? Remember, public assistance programs arose precisely because elective charities weren’t doing the job: if they were, there would have been no-one to need public assistance. Do we return to a eugenics-based belief system, where only the ‘fit’ deserve to survive? But this ignores that which makes human beings simultaneously the most intelligent, capable, and successful species: our highly developed social skills, in which we cooperate, pool our resources, and build on on the work and ideas of others to invent language, technology, and culture such as the world had never seen or likely will again if we eventually go the way of the dinosaurs. If we undermine our own moral sense and hard-heartedly ignore and dispose of the ‘unfit’, we blunt our moral sense and head down the path of mutually assured destruction, where it takes more and more qualifications to remain in the category of the ‘fit’. We’ve gone down that slippery slope before, have already caught a glimpse of such a dystopia in mid-century Europe.

My proposed solution? Re-classify and institute healthcare as the same sort of infrastructure as our system of roads and bridges, the military, the water supply, food-safety administration, our currency, and so forth, as all of these are basic necessities of life, communication, and trade. Collective action problems always have and always will exist, in the free market as well as in public welfare systems, and to give healthcare over to the vaguaries of the free market as if it’s an elective luxury, is a failure of our society’s commitment to the value of the life and liberty of each individual person. Our free-market healthcare system, which leaves so many without the care they need, is not a solution, it’s the result of a lack of political will and imagination, and a moral disgrace to boot.

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Sources and inspiration:

Ariely, Dan. Multiple works on behavioral economics, including his TED talks, lectures, and articles.
http://danariely.com/

Heath, Joseph. Economics Without Illusions, 2010.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Economics_Without_Illusions.html?id=4V8cvQo1Dw8C