Yet everywhere we look, we are confronted by proof of how difficult cooperation can be--snarled traffic, polarized politics, overexploited resources, social problems that go ignored.
Across the Atlantic, the Scottish biologist Vero C. Wynne-Edwards published an ambitious volume titled Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior (1962), which claimed that animal populations evolve to avoid overexploiting their resources.
And in much of the world, the field is very steep -- the pressure to overexploit ocean resources is particularly strong because few alternative sources of livelihood, food, fiber, and other resources are available.
These individuals will begin to overexploit common resources, triggering a cascade of people switching to non-cooperative behaviors.
There would be little incentive for fishermen to overexploit the resources in their "plot" if they didn't have a competitor waiting to pounce on whatever is left uncaught.
That this event would happen at all is critical to the Rapanui, who are widely seen as having a culture whose greatest contribution to the world at large is a dire warning of the consequences that befall a people who overexploit their resources.
His starting point and most lovingly elaborated case study is Easter Island ("the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources"), which he invites the reader to see as a "metaphor, a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future".
The primary motivation for data sharing stems from the desire to protect national benefits and to prevent upstream countries from overexploiting the shared water resources.
While failing to provide for the most essential needs of a share of humankind, we also overexploit the natural resources on which future generations' well-being fundamentally depends.
Rural communities continue to overexploit secondary forest resources due to poverty, rapid population growth and ignorance.
The question analyzed here is in what ways do conflicting environmental knowledges adversely affect the management of overexploited groundwater resources in water-scarce India?
