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? <br />? <br />? <br />? <br />? particular interest in even attempting to exclude the non-payers. <br />? <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 goods, 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 />? <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, destruction 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 environmental 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 publicJcollective property is allowed to deteriorate. This will <br />hold even if there if perfect knowledge of the problem 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 effort. The organized work of all resource appropriators can produce and <br />sustain collective property. Under certain social and political conditions resource users have not <br />allowed other users to simply exploit open access to environmental resources, to capture private <br />benefits at the expense of their common future. If actor X is a member of an organized <br />community where it is clear that all members will refrain from certain exploitations, and all <br />members will sacrifice proportionately so that one does not gain undue advantages over another, <br />and all contribute to sharing costs of maintaining the common or public property, actor X can <br />make investments in collective property knowing that there is an organization in place that will <br />prevent "free-riders" from undoing what organized 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 of collective arrangements that will permit three states and the <br />federal government to transcend their more limited traditional organizational agendas to work <br />together at the river basin level to produce a new form of collective/public property-quality <br />habitat for threatened and endangered species. <br />4