The Global Citizen					August 31, 2000

LET'S STOP RACING EACH OTHER AND GO FOR BEAR INSTEAD
I'd heard the joke about the bear before, and so, probably, have you.  Two guys are sitting outside their tent in their forest campsite when they see a huge angry bear charging toward them.  One starts lacing up his running shoes.  The other says, "Are you crazy?  You'll never outrun that bear!!!"  The first says, "I don't have to outrun the bear.  I only have to outrun you."
Haha, kind of sick humor, really, down the memory hole it goes, with all the other jokes.  But recently it came back up for me in a setting that kept me from forgetting it.
We were sitting in a meeting about the future of the forest industry, talking about the rapid growth of sawmills in New England.  We were wondering whether the forest can grow trees fast enough to keep all those mills supplied.  Wondering whether mill owners ask that question before they expand.  Wondering what drives the expansion in the first place.  Wondering what would happen, if (or when) the mills, through their independent expansion decisions, collectively outgrow the forest.
Some people who know the industry well were saying, in effect, the mills expand because they have to, to adopt new labor-saving and wood-saving technology, to cut costs, to outcompete each other.  They can't know the expansion plans of all other mills, have no way of tracking the wood demands of all mills against the supply capacity of the forest.  They only know that if they can stay ahead of the cost curve, they survive to expand again, but if they fall behind, a bigger mill takes their business.  Grow or die.
That's when the joke about the bear was told.  It cut deep, because in other contexts we've been hearing the same story.
Corn farmers in the Midwest, who get corn yields that are the envy of the entire world, will do or buy just about anything that will help them grow more corn.  Fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, gene-spliced seed, newfangled tractor, whatever boosts that yield per acre, they go for it.
They also all know -- it's amazing to hear them say it -- that as they put more corn on the market, the price of corn goes down, down, down.  The more corn they grow, the lower the price, the more they have to grow JUST TO KEEP MAKING THE SAME INCOME.  They're on a treadmill that they're all working hard to keep turning.  Each one knows that if he's the first to adopt the new technology, and his yield gets a bit ahead of the others, he survives.  If he doesn't, his is the next farm to go on the auction block.
You don't have to beat the bear, you just have to beat the other poor suckers who are trying to beat the bear.
I didn't realize, the first three times I heard it, that this is a joke about the tragedy of the commons.  
(Donella Meadows is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont.)