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excluded at reasonable cost. Since many are benefiting from the investments of others in highly <br />interdependent flow networks, there is no particular interest in even attempting to exclude the <br />non-payers. <br />It is now possible to see the genesis of environmental degradation and, in principle, a path <br />to solution. Rationality in pursuit of private goocis, undisciplined by higher-order community <br />rationality enforced by organizational regulation, will generate a perverse logic that results in the <br />destruction of collective property (e.g., environmental quality). <br />If the consequences of private actions for individuals or firms place a burden on the <br />environment external to the private goods exchange-e.g., toxic flows of waste products, <br />channelization of rivers, deshuction of wetlands--there will be no constructive joint action of the <br />players to rectify matters. If player X should invest in an altruistic act of environmental <br />rehabilitation on a small fraction of damaged stream side, where no one else can be expected to <br />join in, player X alone can do little to reverse river degradation caused by hundreds, thousands, <br />or tens of thousands of players. Player X simply finds the individual investment to be a futile <br />sacrifice. If, on the other hand, if all hundreds or thousands of players would somehow <br />altruistically collaborate in reversing the envirorAmental degradation, nobody would miss the <br />absence of player X's contribution. Therefore, either way, the rational individual with open <br />access to the resource, and no regulation from an effective encompassing organization--will <br />refrain from investing in environmental remedy and simply be a free rider. Because everybody <br />calculates in a similar manner, the public/collective property is allowed to deteriorate. This will <br />hold even if there is perfect knowledge of the prablem and of the solutions. What is rational for <br />the individual in such situations is not rational for the community that would benefit from <br />increased environmental quality. <br />Obviously, there is a solution that human beings in many societies have known for <br />thousands of years. Get organized so that any one investor can be assured that all others will <br />make coordinated and proportionate effort. The organized work of all resource appropriators can <br />produce and sustain collective property. Under certain social and political conditions resource <br />users have not allowed other users to simply exploit open access to environmental resources, to <br />capture private benefits at the expense of their common future. If actor X is a member of an <br />organized community where it is clear that all members will refrain from certain exploitations, <br />and all members will sacrifice proportionately so that one does not gain undue advantages over <br />another, and all contribute to sharin.g costs of maintaining the common or public property, actor <br />X can make investments in collective property knowing that there is an organization in place that <br />will prevent "free-riders" from undoing what arganized restraint in resource use has gained. <br />The solution to the common property resource problem, and especially the pure collective <br />property problem is, therefore, social organization; organization that controls access, insures <br />sharing of benefits and costs, and controls potential "free riders." <br />The Platte River Recovery Program negotiations are of interest precisely because they <br />promise to build an organized set o:f collective arrangements that will permit water users and <br />environmentalists in three states and the federal government to transcend their more limited <br />?t