Thursday, December 10, 2015

Tragedy Of The College Students

“The tragedy of the commons is a term to denote a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each other's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by depleting some common resource.”--Wikipedia


            The first example of tragedy of the commons that I remember hearing in my Global Environment class was the example given about driving on the turnpike. Usually by the time people are getting off the Jersey turnpike they are frustrated with the aggressive drivers, the awful scenery (if they’re in the north) and the long distance they have traveled. When they finally reach their exit all of the lane lines disappear and it can turn into a weird game of Frogger to reach the tolls. People are desperately searching for the quickest lane and cutting others off in order to come out on the side closest to the north or south road they are planning on taking after their E-Z pass is recognized.  Before this class I couldn’t have told you a thing about tragedy of the commons. I think that this concept is so interesting. Now, whenever I exit the turnpike when I head home for the holidays I think about how being a little more courteous as a driver could have a chain reaction on the rest of the commuters. 

             Growing up I was raised to recycle, to compost, to reuse, to donate, to find a better place for everything that most others would place in a non-biodegradable plastic bag. Coming to college has made all of this very difficult. The takeout boxes from the dining hall and weekend festivities are made of Styrofoam, the red solo cups at parties aren’t recyclable in New Brunswick are all sitting in a landfill somewhere. While at school I had fallen out of my green ways, not because I didn’t care but because of convenience.  I still felt guilty about throwing things in the trash instead of waiting for a recycling can; I just didn’t let that guilt bother me enough. 
Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing
but pictures, and carry your reusable
water bottle. 

            Since this class I have realized that by me doing this I am only acting in regards to my own best interests. I am contributing to this theme of the tragedy of the commons. It had been eating at me for a while how wasteful things were becoming in my life compared to normal. Then in class we had our lecture about waste production and that was it for me. My guilt was back, only paper bags at the super-market, refusing bags everywhere else, avoiding the Styrofoam cups at the dining hall takeout and shaming my boyfriend into buying a reusable water bottle. I became a vegetarian again, stopped buying anything that came in individually wrapped packages, and boasted to all of my housemates how great the reusable menstrual cups are.





*I wrote this for an extra credit assignment for my Transforming the Global Environment class at Rutgers University.