Overexploitation

Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, allocated to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource. The term applies to natural resources such(a) as: wild medicinal plants, grazing pastures, game animals, fish stocks, forests, together with water aquifers.

In ecology, overexploitation describes one of the five leading activities threatening global biodiversity. Ecologists ownership the term to describe populations that are harvested at an unsustainable rate, condition their natural rates of mortality as alive as capacities for reproduction. This can sum in extinction at the population level and even extinction of whole species. In conservation biology, the term is ordinarily used in the context of human economic activity that involves the taking of biological resources, or organisms, in larger numbers than their populations can withstand. The term is also used and defined somewhat differently in fisheries, hydrology and natural resource management.

Overexploitation can lead to resource destruction, including discussed below in the member on fisheries. In the context of fishing, the term overfishing can be used instead of overexploitation, as can overgrazing in stock management, overlogging in forest management, overdrafting in aquifer management, and endangered species in classification monitoring. Overexploitation is non an activity limited to humans. featured predators and herbivores, for example, can overexploit native flora and fauna.

Overview

Overexploitation does non necessarily lead to the harm of the resource, nor is it necessarily unsustainable. However, depleting the numbers or amount of the resource can modify its quality. For example, footstool palm is a wild palm tree found in Southeast Asia. Its leaves are used for thatching and food wrapping, and overharvesting has resulted in its leaf size becoming smaller.

In 1968, the journal ] Lloyd remanded a simplified hypothetical situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe. Herders share common land on which they are regarded and identified separately. entitled to graze their cows. In Hardin's article, this is the in each herder's individual interest to graze each new cow that the herder acquires on the common land, even whether the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded, which damages the common for any the herders. The self-interested herder receives all of the benefits of having the extra cow, while all the herders share the damage to the common. However, all herdersthe same rational decision to buy extra cows and graze them on the common, which eventually destroys the common. Hardin concludes:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to put his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.: 1244 

In the course of his essay, Hardin develops the theme, drawing in many examples of latter day commons, such(a) as national parks, the atmosphere, oceans, rivers and fish stocks. The example of fish stocks had led some to asked this the "tragedy of the fishers". A major theme running through the essay is the growth of human populations, with the Earth's finite resources being the general common.

The tragedy of the commons has intellectual roots tracing back to Aristotle, who covered that "what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it", as alive as to Hobbes and his Leviathan. The opposite situation to a tragedy of the commons is sometimes referred to as a tragedy of the anticommons: a situation in which rational individuals, acting separately, collectively waste a given resource by underutilizing it.

The tragedy of the commons can be avoided if it is for appropriately regulated. Hardin's ownership of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, main Hardin to laterthat he should hold titled his cause "The tragedy of the unregulated commons".