Excessive foraging for wild garlic and mushrooms in UK ‘a risk to wildlife’

Experts say foragers taking too much, selling the goods commercially and harming fragile ecosystems

This was explored by Garrett Hardin in his Tragedy of the Commons essay. True, he tried to apply it to population where it doesn’t actually work. It’s also true that Elinor Ostrom gained her Nobel for noting how within smaller societies social pressure is a possible third management technique. But the base idea still stands.

When we have Marxian - open - access to a resource and demand rises above the regenerative capability of that resource then we need to have a management system. Which can be a capitalist, or private property solution. Or, a regulatory, rules based or as Hardin called it socialist, solution. Which works better will depend upon the specifics of the thing that is to be regulated. There is no in theory correct answer which applies to all things. We’re back in that most common of economic answers, “It Depends”.

As it turns out with land itself private property seems to work best. Access to the resource being controlled by the owner of that land. Invoking some medieval idea of the “commons” doesn’t work here as they were not open access in the slightest; those libraries full of manorial records are in fact records of who did have - and who did not - the right of access to the resource.

As a society we’ve faced this problem before and know how to solve it.

Gerrof moi land is that solution. We should apply it again.