I think there are some practical consequences to his line of thought that bear scrutiny. For Hardin, the base consumptive unit is racial or national; the world

I think there are some practical consequences to his line of thought that bear scrutiny. For Hardin, the base consumptive unit is racial or national; the world can be understood as races (and, within races, differing social classes) competing to devour scarce resources by outbreeding each other. In other words, for Hardin the mathematical model is a springboard into a racial-supremacist and social-Darwinian worldview. Practically, this means that Hardin’s prescriptions tend towards what can be called without irony “eco-fascism;” of course we need government intervention into “breeding,” to prevent the lower classes from breeding us into imbicility! Of course we need to be vigilant lest the Muslims/Africans/Latinos outbreed us! Hardin’s worldview is a bleak, intolerant vision of race wars over shrinking resource bases, eternally. Contrast with a more (clasically) liberal view of the TotC as a market failure based on insufficient information and incorrect pricing. In this view, the problem is simply that the regulative norms of the market need to be adjusted (through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, etc), and we can collaboratively (and democratically) work to ensure ecological sustainability (I’ll leave aside caveats regarding the current state of global and national political polarization). So, practically speaking, Hardin’s analysis needs to be heavily caveated at a minimum, or exhaustively analyzed to better understand the political and social dynamics of environmentalist theory and practice. Certainly, it helps explain why, though environmentalists are not themselves attracted to fascism, why some fascists are attracted to their own form of environmentalism.