In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin defined tragedy as the unhappiness attendant to inexorable processes. Hardin’s bleak assessment of what population growth will do to our free spaces lies behind much of the impulse to protect wild lands as wilderness. The Tragedy of the Commons started with grim assumptions about human nature, and any number of drastic compromises were justified from that point on.

Hardin saw no democratic way to stop the eventual destruction of the things held in common by human beings, whether they were the Boulder-White Clouds or the oceans or the gene pool. In the absence of the greater tragedies of a worldwide plague or nuclear war, Hardin saw our only hope to be a wise and incorruptible police force enforcing wise and just laws regulating land use, resource extraction, water and air quality, and population. He held no faith in the individual’s ability to become conscious of environmental tragedy, much less to use that consciousness to effect change. Government coercion along with privatization was the only way to defend wild land from being overrun by a striving, compulsively breeding, voraciously consuming plague of human locusts. Hardin did worry about who would watch the watchers, but his philosophical descendants have no such concerns.

As a former member of a wilderness police force, I can say with some certainty that incorruptible police forces are not possible if the police are human. I was too easy on the people I was supposed to police, and some of my fellow wilderness rangers took an active and sadistic pleasure in being too hard. Nobody got it just right. One of the things that I am amazed by is the naïve faith of environmental organizations that uniformed enforcers will preserve the wild from visitors they assume would otherwise wreck it. They count on CIEDRA-style bills to both attract humans and regulate a human nature characterized by unenlightened self-interest.

But if you look carefully at a CIEDRA, you will see that it isn’t a way to stop Hardin’s almost mathematical destruction of a commons. Instead, it is a calculated attempt to turn wilderness into commodity, and by doing so, it exemplifies the process Garrett Hardin was trying to prevent. Lost in this vision of things is the intent of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and with it, the possibility of non-programmed experience of the natural world. Lost also are the conscious visitors implied by the language of the Wilderness Act. They have been replaced by the not-so-conscious visitors implied by the list of rules and regulations printed on every wilderness visitor permit. Most importantly, the transfer of public lands to private hands starts the process by which the federal lands of the American West will be bought and sold as commodities rather than held in trust for all citizens.

The idea that wilderness designation preserves wild areas for future generations is no guarantee of Barry Commoner’s suggestion that those future generations could be composed of wise and aware human beings. Wilderness, as envisioned by a CIEDRA, loses its power to educate and ennoble. It becomes the backdrop for SUV ads and real estate brochures, or becomes a bargaining chip in the game of privatizing public lands. It becomes a charity-appeal statistic for acre-counting non-government organizations. It becomes a financial bailout for local officials. It becomes a payoff for environmental organizations whose partnerships with the recreation industry threaten to standardize and sterilize our encounters with the wild.

Like so many of our attempts to commodify wild things, a CIEDRA contains the seeds of its own destruction. Commodified, Wilderness becomes a purely human experience with purely human value, and it’s Garret Hardin rather than Barry Commoner who gets to define “human.” Ultimately a CIEDRA transforms every good thing into a transaction and destroys all but the financial value of the land it presumes to protect.

As someone who grew up climbing up and down the Boulders’ and the White Clouds’ canyons and noting their delicacy and beauty, I was hoping they would have a few more years under the radar, a few more years of benign neglect, a few more years of peace, and a few more years of avoiding the tragedy of the commons.