ABSTRACT
Environmental damage is caused by a form of the prisoner’s dilemma, except that it is played by many players, not two. The problem in the prisoner’s dilemma is to get two egoists to cooperate for the greater good, and to eschew the temptation to profit at the other’s expense. The genius of the Aboriginal economy was to extract the maximum amount of sustenance, for a large number of people, from a landscape with the maximum number of trees possible in a particular environment. The colonists arrived in Australia to find a whole continent of wilderness, a continent of apparent failure to manage the countryside. It wasn’t what they had been trained to see as a proper human environment, and they set about putting it in order, rather as one might start cleaning the rubbish out of a derelict house. Domesticating the environment means that at best only a few species of each kind of animal will be selected for saving.
