ABSTRACT
For many US scholars, the federal public lands are (or once were) perhaps the archetypal commons. To visualize Hardin’s pasture is, in all likelihood, to imagine a landscape somewhere in the American Mountain West, with herdsmen competing for valuable pasture in an otherwise arid territory. For Hardin, even the US National Parks—the crown jewels of the federal system of public lands—were paradigmatic commons, leading Hardin to conclude that “we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone” (Hardin 1968, 1245).
