The Land Group

By Ben Alder | From Kingston
August 9, 2026

In 1968, Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons and offered a pretty bleak view of our ability to manage shared natural resources:

“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

His argument was simple. Given access to a shared resource, the fisherman will catch another fish, the farmer will graze another cow, and eventually those individual decisions will exhaust the resource.

Even as a graduate student in my twenties, I had trouble accepting such a fatalistic view of the world.

I had already seen something different around the Chesapeake Bay.

There were certainly environmental problems throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But I also saw farmers, hunters, fishermen, conservation groups and government agencies changing the way they did things. Programs were being developed to reward private landowners for conservation. Institutions changed. Landowners changed.

People made different choices.

More recently, I discovered the work of Elinor Ostrom, whose research on the governance of common resources earned her the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009.

Ostrom did not argue that people will always make good decisions. Her point was more practical. As she once put it:

“Humans are neither all angels nor all devils.”

That seems about right.

Hardin largely treated individual self-interest as a fixed condition leading toward an inevitable outcome. Ostrom looked at what people actually do when they have to deal with scarcity. They establish rules. They create incentives. They learn from mistakes. Sometimes they fail.

But they adapt.

That distinction matters today because private land throughout the Chesapeake region is being asked to do more things for more people than perhaps ever before.

Agriculture. Housing. Solar energy. Data centers. Sand and gravel. Wildlife habitat. Water quality. Public infrastructure.

All of them are competing for the same finite landscape.

And sitting in the middle of it is the private landowner.

Consider a farmer in Virginia whose pasture might ordinarily be worth $7,000 or $10,000 an acre. Suppose a data center developer offers $40,000 an acre.

What exactly do we expect that landowner to do?

Selling may provide retirement security, eliminate debt or create something meaningful for children and grandchildren. It can be an entirely rational decision. It can also permanently change the landscape.

All of this can be true.

That is where the idea of the commons gets interesting to me.

I see this from two directions. At Kingston, I make these decisions as a landowner. Through The Land Group, I watch other landowners make them as an advisor.

The choices are rarely simple.

I am frequently asked what a solar development next to someone’s farm will do to the value of their property. My answer is usually, “I don’t know,” or that I do not have enough data to answer definitively.

However, I almost immediately tell them to make sure the project has a substantial forested buffer.

So perhaps I do know. Or perhaps it is simply my own aesthetic bias.

I also paid top dollar for the farm adjoining Kingston, in part because I did not want to risk seeing that land converted to a solar project.

That was my choice.

But it would be unreasonable to expect every landowner to make the same one.

We cannot expect a landowner to personally absorb the economic cost of preserving all of the public benefits his farm provides.

A 300-acre farm may provide wildlife habitat, open space, groundwater recharge, food production and scenic character. Those benefits extend well beyond the property lines.

The mortgage, taxes and operating expenses do not.

That is why zoning, conservation programs, technical assistance and the institutions around landowners matter.

Conservation easements, ecosystem markets, tax policy, agricultural programs, land trusts and local zoning are all attempts, in one way or another, to balance private property rights with public benefits.

They are imperfect. They do not always work together. Sometimes they work against one another.

There isn’t one answer.

Hardin himself recognized that there was no purely “technical solution” to the problem of the commons. Land use ultimately requires choices about what we value.

The highest and best economic use of one property may not be the best use of the broader landscape. At the same time, preserving that landscape cannot depend on asking individual landowners to continually sacrifice their own economic interests for everyone else’s benefit.

Somewhere between those two positions is where the real work has to happen.

We need private and governmental institutions that recognize public benefits and compensate private landowners for providing them. We need zoning that considers permanence and cumulative effects. And we need conservation programs that can change as the landscape changes.

Most importantly, landowners themselves have to be part of those decisions.

That is where I think Ostrom offers a more useful framework than Hardin.

The future is not predetermined by individual self-interest. Nor can it be protected simply through government intervention. Ultimately, many of these choices will be made by the private landowner or land manager. The institutions and incentives around them need to recognize who is actually making the decision and, just as importantly, who is carrying the financial risk.

There is no technical solution. There never will be.

Land use today is not uniquely tragic, and these choices are not particularly new. What is different is the scale and speed of the pressure being placed on land, and the number of competing interests we are asking a single acre to carry.

Economics, ecology, energy, housing and infrastructure are increasingly converging on the same ground.

The question is not whether those interests will conflict. They will.

The question is whether we can build systems that allow those conflicts to be worked through in ways that make economic sense and are environmentally durable.

That work will not happen in theory. It will happen parcel by parcel and decision by decision, through landowners, land managers and the institutions around them.

There is no final equilibrium. There is only the continuing process of adjustment.

Perhaps that is Ostrom’s most important lesson. The commons do not fail simply because people act in their own self-interest. They fail when the systems around those decisions do not account for how people actually make choices under real economic constraints.

The task is not to eliminate self-interest.

It is to better align it with the landscape we all depend upon.