Tragedy of the Commons

I am sure everyone here knows of the "tragedy of the Commons," the famous essay in Science which says that environmental problems are caused by the fact that everyone has an incentive to exploit a resources (overfish, dump pollutants into the river) and we need a good political system to stop this.

The Oil Drum blog (The campfire series) just had a presentation/revisit on this The companion article on the difficulty of creating a good political system is relevant to this blog.