The Wisdom of the Commons: ‘Together’ is Always Better

The idea of commons, quite rightly, has gained an increased currency in recent years. This has happened in many fields, several of which contribute to this collection, but – unsurprisingly given the millennia-long history of landbased commons – it has become increasingly visible in the field of heritageand-landscape discourse as much as in any field. Unfortunately, however, the word ‘commons’ is far too often prefaced by the words ‘tragedy of ’. The blame for this rests on a short, misunderstood paper published half a century ago by the American neo-Malthusian ecologist Garret Hardin, to which far too much attention has been paid (Hardin 1968). So-called ‘seminal’ works, recurrently cited as the theoretical basis of research, are not uncommon in the literature of landscape and heritage. In some cases, however, their significance is undeserved, and they are not necessarily celebrated for valid reasons. Some – Carl Sauer’s (1925) ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, Marwyn Samuel’s (1979) ‘Biography of Landscape’, perhaps even (at a very different level) Simon Schama’s (1995) ‘Landscape and Memory’ and certainly Garrett Hardin’s (1968) ‘Tragedy of the Commons‘ – have been used in ways neither intended nor anticipated by their authors. They are often the work of people from outside the landscape and heritage field, but this is in itself not problematic; all disciplinary visitors are welcome to fields that are