Commentators once predicted environmental regulation could only be achieved by authoritarian states.

Evidence

The notion that environmental lawmaking presents unique institutional and social challenges, especially for Western legal traditions and lawmaking processes, is not new. Based on just such generalized concerns, many commentators prophesied thirty years ago that environmentalism would inevitably lead to enormous political upheaval in the United States. Some predicted that only a fascist state could meet the challenges of effectively regulating environmental pollution. According to William Ophuls in the initial edition of his darkly foreboding Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, published in 1977, “[t]he golden age of individualism, liberty and democracy is all but over.” Garrett Hardin, author of the widely influential essay The Tragedy of the Commons, in 1968, similarly contended that what was needed was a “world government that is sovereign in reproduction matters” and went on to claim that “injustice is preferable to total ruin.” — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons directly connects to the Trust/cooperation material and institutional economics in the reader’s knowledge base.