Richard Gaines’ story (Times, Saturday, Oct. 24) suggests that Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning economics work should erase the notion of the "tragedy of the commons," replacing it with the idea that "local users" are the best managers of natural resources.
While this is certainly true in some places and circumstances, experience suggests that groups of resource users, local or otherwise, often cannot see or do not care how their actions contribute to large-scale and cumulative effects.
In the northwest Atlantic Ocean, we have seen the decimation of the great fisheries in what Mark Kurlansky’s book "Cod" called a "500-year fishing derby," culminating in the last 50 years in the rapacious exploitation of the fishing banks by foreign boats, overbuilding of the domestic fleet and similar resource exploitation after the establishment of the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. It’s brought the near death of cod as a commercial species and the crashing of many others, a rash of boat scuttlings and burnings in Gloucester, and the current fisheries management regime.