ABSTRACT
It was a short, simple article in Science on December 13, 1968, that focused on the environmental impacts of unrestrained population growth and the social dynamics of decision-making that pitted benefi ts to others against benefi ts to self. While Garrett Hardin’s basic thesis on population control in “Tragedy of the Commons” has not withstood the test of time, it did introduce a term that has endured (Hardin, 1968, 1998). From 10 citations in other academic works in 1969, the article would be cited over 150 times by 1979 before it began to decline in the eyes of other natural scientists and was cited by them less than 10 times in 1990. That same year, social scientists cited the original article over 50 times and by 1996 the number of annual social science citations had risen to over 90 per year (Burger & Gochfeld, 1998, p. 7).
