In 1968, a professor of human ecology named Garrett Hardin published an essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin showed how humans, acting in their own self-interest, would inevitably wreck any resource held in common with other humans. Sharing, in spite of what we all learned in kindergarten, would result in the destruction of wilderness or clean water or forests or fish stocks, simply because these things don’t grow with population and in the absence of constraint, an individual who takes more than his share benefits more than the individual who doesn’t.

Hardin viewed human nature as nasty and brutish, but The Tragedy of the Commons has become one of the sacred texts of contemporary environmentalism. It’s often seen only as a treatise on overgrazing, but Hardin’s grassland commons are a stand-in for the larger commons of the atmosphere, rivers, oceans, natural resources and living space.

Hardin saw environmental protection as necessarily authoritarian. He recommended eliminating procreation-at-will and putting an end to immigration, and suggested privatizing public land or restricting access to it as a way to prevent its total degradation. He suggested that if we didn’t reduce population, the United States would increasingly resemble the Third World: masses of poor people living in deserts, ruled over by a tiny and corrupt elite.

A counterpoint environmental movement of the ’60s and ’70s grew alongside its authoritarian branch. It wasn’t libertarian, although it depended on free choice. Call it instead consciousness-raising environmentalism. Its chief proponent was Barry Commoner, who advocated ethical education in matters of the environment. If people understood the issues, Commoner suggested, they would voluntarily restrain themselves when it came to protecting the commons.

Commoner did not underestimate the magnitude of the cultural change needed. He suggested that capitalism itself, with its tendency to seize public property for raw material or dumping grounds, prevented sustainable environmental protection because it depended on continuous growth to survive in a world of shrinking resources. He suggested that capitalism could be modified toward a sustainable steady-state economy. Population could be stabilized by educating people to the joys of being kid-free and giving women free access to birth control. Resources could be conserved by teaching people not to buy what they didn’t need, and making them conscious of the clean air, water and space that they did need.

Global corporations, free-market economists, authoritarian environmentalists, and the Judaic-Christian-Islamic religions have spent the last four decades discrediting consciousness-raising environmentalism. But Commoner’s environmental vision becomes the only option when we look at the probably insoluble and probably deadly problems we face with global population or the human effect on the climate. Even though we’re downwind, we cannot pass laws to regulate China’s coal-fired power plants, just as China cannot enforce her one-child policy on southern Idaho’s families. By his reasoning, we have to educate the Chinese that the limiting factor in coal-fired power is not coal reserves, it’s carbon dioxide and mercury and the methane released by mining coal (and it would be good to convince our own leaders of this fact as well). The Chinese would do well to educate the rest of the world to the consequences of overpopulation, preferably by some other way than the appalling object lesson they currently present.

Since 1968, the planet’s population has doubled. Much of what Hardin predicted has come true. Idaho and the rest of the American West are becoming Hardin’s Third World, particularly in the debate on the commons that are Idaho’s wild lands.