A rock concert, a fragile city, and the unseen cost of crowd behavior. What happens when personal freedom clashes with communal responsibility in public spaces? And: Is trust in others a superpower?

When Pink Floyd arrived in Venice for a concert in the summer of 1989, many people were unsure whether the city’s delicate equilibrium could handle a rock concert by a band known for show extravaganza.

Over 200,000 fans arrived in Venice from Italy and abroad to see the group, and RAI broadcasted the show to over 20 countries and 100 million people. Even though most visitors “were on their best behavior,” the show was a net loss for the city after people “left behind 300 tons of garbage and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles. Concertgoers relieved themselves on the monuments and walls because the city didn’t provide portable bathrooms.”

Soon after, the city’s mayor, Antonio Casellati, and his team resigned. Most people who visited Venice to attend the concert acted in their interest and good faith; however, in the aggregate of 200,000 people, this attitude caused environmental and social impact on the city’s fragile infrastructure and cherished public spaces.

Pink Floyd’s 1989 concert is an outlier among the increasingly common cases of overcrowding and overuse of cultural and natural spaces. Most of us have experienced similar situations and—perhaps—contributed to overuse and degradation despite our efforts to avoid doing so.

City dweller’s former relation to trust

Growing up in the city and having been among crowds of different sorts, most of us are wary of herd mentality patterns, though it doesn’t take a gregarious crowd to get the worst tendencies out of some people. When we feel detached from our environment and mainly care about our own whereabouts and entertainment, concerns such as our impact somewhere are secondary at best.

That’s why I enjoy perceiving the inner workings of ancient institutions that manage over and over to get the best of each and almost every one of us. Consider, for example, the Scandinavian principle of “everyman’s right” (allemansrätten in Sweden, allemannsretten in Norway, and jokamiehenoikeus in Finland) or freedom to roam anywhere in nature (private or public space) as long as we pick up our stuff and make it non-permanent.

A few years ago, friends studying in Trondheim, Norway, invited us to stay in a turf house that they maintain and keep open to anyone visiting the natural area outside the city where it’s located.

Experiencing Normay’s nature may resonate among many people due to the majesty of fjords and purity of light and air, and many times, one will feel transported to other places of the world that still keep this pristine character: the inhabited areas of the Pacific Northwest as described by Kenneth Brower in The Starship and the Canoe, or the open landscapes in the Chilean Patagonia described by Jonathan Franklin in A Wild Idea, the biography of the North Face’s founder Doug Tompkins.

And many others that shall stay unknown for as long as possible.

Fighting against the ugliness of the world

A few years back, Henrik Lande Andersen, a then cinema student from Oslo who had left the comforts of the city to live in the Lofoten archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, contacted us to share his idealist quest to restore a WW2 German bunker he had stumbled upon on a hike into a cabin for people to stay in.

Henrik’s idea wasn’t to promote the place and attract visitors to his pricy bed and breakfast. He wanted to fix it himself with leftovers, and anyone was welcome to check it out and stay on it, as long as they left the place in the same shape they had found the place (though unasked repairs and improvements by anyone were welcome).

Several years passed, and we talked to Henrik about finally visiting his place. We were glad to finally make the hike and check the bunker out, which has hosted many, many visitors who have given back more than they took from the shelter overseeing the majestic peaks and ocean, where occasionally one can observe a solitary vessel or a group of orcas playing with the currents. A wonderful nest perched over the fjord, a little fort of the innocent, playful human that fights to stay alive in all of us.

We observed that the door had no key. One could read, “No key, feel free.” And that’s what people do.

What makes the place work? According to Henrik,

“When people feel trusted, they will give the trust back.”

It’s a simple way to explain the magic of “freedom to roam” across Northern Europe and a reminder that it takes an idealist spell for everyone to step up and give the best of themselves to pay back.

A commenter, R.P. Rosen, explained what the video by Kirsten on our visit, which she posted this week, opened to him:

“I get weighed down by all the ugliness in this world. Thank You Kirsten & Nicolas for lightening my spirit with the beauty you find (people/nature/architecture). It gives me hope & optimism. I wish good things for Henrik … Love and Peace to all.”

A drop of water in the ocean

Which brings one question: if we know we can be nice to our surroundings and each other once in a while, why not practice this gift more often, even acknowledging that we’ll keep different personal interests and points of view? Can we play fair “when nobody is watching?”

Humans are very good at avoiding potential conflict or cognitive dissonance between one’s beliefs and activities on one side and the aggregated outcome of such actions on the other. Our legitimate individual actions are what matter, and there’s little interest in realizing the consequences of any aggregated outcome.

More frequent heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest, where HVAC wasn’t a strategic decision for most families due to a mild climate, have one fix for most people—one they can benefit from right away: Air Conditioning. This invention turbocharged the migration from expensive cities to the Sun Belt.

Today, new homes and apartments going up in San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle prioritize central air as much as places in the Northeast, where very humid and hot days are much more common during the warm months. That this trend contributes to some extent to the trend towards more uncommon heat days seems to worry most people little, if anything at all.

It’s a drop of water in the ocean, but the reality we live in is full of cases of drops of water in the ocean. Even though we sense that acting rationally to conform to our legitimate interests can be detrimental if everyone does the same, we shove it off with a perfect alibi: our busy lives and lack of responsibility regarding things that feel abstract and detached from our immediate reality.

The old ways to avoid the tragedy of the commons

To builders and homebuyers alike, it seems more straightforward to use a few house design templates irrespective of the local climate and adjust their performance with insulation and a powerful HAVC system than, say, explore traditional and/or vernacular building designs that once naturally withstood the particularities of every climate (for example, dry places can benefit from affordable evaporative coolers as moisture evaporation can cool down hot and dry places sheltered by vegetation and shades).

To understand the tension between short-term individual benefits and long-term communal risk, we could re-watch Jaws (1975). Amity Island depends on tourism for economic survival, so a deadly shark attack will not make authorities close the beach, as town leaders prioritize short-term economic gains over safety.

Looking at reality as a zero-sum competitive game in which we compete against others for resources until we outsmart them for a quick gain, as the principles of economic incentives illustrate, can lead to stressful situations that won’t improve our outcome, on the contrary.

Come what may, we don’t want to be the kids hoarding resources from Lord of the Flies at the expense of not keeping the common smoke signal that could alert vessels cruising near the island; or the concertgoers collecting mattresses in the campground during the infamous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas.

We barely pay attention to them, but we’re surrounded by remnants of collective institutions that evolved to avoid overuse and depletion of resources as we all, acting in our self-interest, contribute to their overexploitation. Consider the ancient—and hardly sexy— pastoralist art of transhumance, which made the merino wool industry one of the most valuable sectors in Spain’s economy during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.

Transhumance remnants crossing a late-80s urban landscape

As a kid, I was always amazed by one recurrent image that didn’t seem to click with the urban reality surrounding me in my town just outside Barcelona: once in a while, somewhere near the urban environment I’d been accustomed to, one could see one or a few men, often helped by dogs, halting traffic momentarily so they could cross a modern road or go underneath the highway with their flock of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of sheep.

Later, I learned that sheep left the valleys for the mountains in the pre-Pyrenees and Pyrenees to allow grazing. The same image is replicated in the Cantabrian foothills, the Spanish plateau, the French Massif Central, the Alps, the Welsh highlands, the Italian Apennines, the Balkans, and many more European temperate places. Similar seasonal pathways have also shaped landscapes in North America, the Andes, Central Asia, the Himalayas foothills, and Eastern Africa’s highlands. It was a part of an ancient right of passage for shepherds and livestock.

In other parts of Catalonia and Spain, this pastoralist phenomenon had lost its economic importance but was kept alive by a few diehards, sometimes with sheep flocks (the “army” perceived by Don Quixote during his adventures around the pathways of La Mancha), sometimes with herds of cattle and other animals.

I didn’t know then, but such migrations were exponents of an ancient model of communal rights that guaranteed livestock the right to pass (in the Crown of Castile, the Mesta) between summer and winter pastures, using “cañadas,” or livestock trails that remain protected as paths 75 meters wide to allow people to move their animals, at no cost.

Commons management in Medieval Europe vanished in most realms, but some of their remnants (whether they are irrigation systems like “acequias” in the Hispanic world and “subak” in Indonesia; shared pastureland and fisheries like the English commons and the Swiss Alpine pastures; collective management of the landscape like the Japanese Satoyama system; or the Nordic right to roam and camp in nature, among many others) remind us of what’s possible when people build institutions that depend on trust and good faith instead of mere economic incentives.

Common-pool resources and modernity

Political scientist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom studied historical examples like the English Commons, where shared lands used by local communities for grazing, farming, and gathering resources were governed by customary rights to ensure sustainable use. She acknowledged that this Medieval system was an effective strategy of community-based management and local governance, avoiding the tragedy of the commons.

To her, it was mesmerizing that such an anachronistic example showed better than any modern incentives-based system how community-based management and local governance are ways to avoid resource depletion. If common-pool resources can be managed sustainably without external regulation or privatization, why was modernity struggling with the overuse of water resources along the Colorado River basin, among similar phenomena?

The Nobel in Economics challenged the “tragedy of the commons” by including more successful examples of communal resource management, pinpointing that this is not only a Western or European matter. Established rules, social norms, shared responsibility, and good old common sense have helped people in Nepal to manage forests under collective arrangements. Nepal’s common forests show higher biodiversity and better sustainability than the ones managed by private hands or the state.

She also studied fisheries in Alanya, Turkey, where they developed a rotating system of fishing zones based on a lottery system that locals respect. This system has prevented overfishing while maintaining equitable access.

We assume that a big part of adulthood involves a readjustment of expectations: We become more cynical and pragmatic while learning to relativize our idealism, even when we still think we support our convictions like the first day.

Endless resources’ mentality: flaws of meliorism and utilitarianism

There’s a reason why many capable people are attracted by rational ideas of a world that can be improved through human effort and progress, whether we believe in an arch of the moral universe bending toward justice (as in meliorism) or we rather advocate for pragmatic actions that maximize overall happiness and well-being (utilitarianism), bringing “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

Visit resources like Our World in Data, and it won’t take you long to see that, in most regards, the world has transformed into a better place for most of humanity thanks to the world of abundance that modernity has created, sustained mainly by industrial and scientific progress, which flourished thanks to institutions like property rights and modern medicine. But that’s not the whole picture, and we could drawn into a sea of platitudes if we were to settle with explanations manufactured by ChatGPT, Stephen Pinker, et al.

The elephant in the room is how sustainable our gains have been and will be in the long run as we continue to create and allocate resources and wealth, not considering their cost or “externality” with nature as if we had infinite resources: infinite water in the Colorado River Basin; infinite oil in the Canadian Rockies; infinite fisheries in the oceans (mercury and other heavy metal levels aside); infinite lithium and rare metals to transition to EV mobility; infinite appetite for content to keep mining our digital attention; etc.

Even the “new models” are based on this assumption: that, through progress, anything is possible, and gains will be exponential, outpacing any possible resource or environmental constraint. The idea of progress was born in a world where natural resources seemed infinite, and therefore, there was no need to limit the potential advantages of legally sanctioning self-interest. In fact, we learned greed was good and even holy if one wanted to be a good pastor on Earth to manage the resources that the Divine had provided us with.

Harmonizing personal interest and the commons

It didn’t take long, however, for people to see that, in many cases, when individuals acting in their self-interest depleted a shared resource (“the commons”), an eventual collapse ended up harming the whole group. Cutting all the best old trees to build the best pre-modern vessels, overgrazing pastures, or hunting every whale and bison soon presented a gloomy outcome for all. Garret Hardin called this phenomenon of rational depletion in which our civilization runs the “tragedy of the commons.”

So far, well-informed cynics have devised ways of overriding our world’s limitations so that anyone pursuing their market-driven self-interest would have no constraints. One such way is to expand to other places in our solar system, from asteroids to moons to planets, to mine there the resources that eventually could speed our demise on Earth.

Others advocate using trial-and-error (i.e., scientific discovery) to create tailored solutions to the problems encountered along the way. A third model believes that management, regulations, and “good governance” will establish sufficient common sense to avoid catastrophic scenarios so big “tragedies of the commons” can be avoided. For example, we don’t know if or when the North Stream, the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Northern Europe’s mild temperatures, could collapse. So, cynics might say, why bother?

Here’s a paradox nobody is trying to answer realistically, let alone convincingly: if several pre-modern institutions, adopted after centuries, sometimes millennia, of trial and error, managed to balance good outcomes for people without causing resource depletion, why modernity seems not capable of doing so? The answer, like almost always, is in the details.

After a period of regulation of strategic sectors during the Cold War, the model that followed opted for “self-regulation,” letting corporations mainly govern themselves and set their own limits and best practices, which we can see once again now with Meta establishing mild limits to teenage use on Instagram before Congress decides to act, pressured by the population.

A myopic rule of thumb

Whether we live or not in the best possible worlds, we see many things we’d like to improve every day but feel impotent. After all—we rationalize—the time to start one-man Quixotic endeavors is anachronistic, and anybody trying to make a difference with their actions would arrive centuries late. Or would he?

To most of us, non-tangible constructions of civilization based on honor, clemency, consensus, or trust are just too weak to rely on, so when people have good prospects or have accumulated or inherited substantial wealth, they decide to sign binding contracts (non-disclosure agreements, premarital agreements based on economic expectations, etc.).

Today, our technical society regulates every aspect of our lives. Unsurprisingly, all activities, even those most convivial, are now incentive-based frameworks where everything is measured based on perceived economic value. Why undergo the hassle of nurturing our friendships and acquaintances to stay somewhere when we visit a place if we can rent a place with one click? Why wait in line or sit patiently in traffic during rush hour if we can pay our way to use the fast lane?

Slowly but unrelentingly, as we analyze and quantify any possible human need and activity and define its relative price (a value which often isn’t calculated based on actual cost but on gatekeepers’ interests), the secular institutions that allocated resources harmoniously using the power of good idealism: honor, social norms “when nobody is looking,” reputation, trust, reciprocity, shared dreams and beliefs, good local governance, and many more Quixotic “constructions” helped people manage the delicate balance between rights and responsibilities.

Sadly, when we measure everything by performance, cost, and value, even those interactions that made us human, we lose much more than the idealism of our youth—we are also turning our back to the ways of our ancestors (those close to us but also the remote ancestors we share with many other people).

Before modernity, traditional societies living on the margins of survivability learned how to steward their surroundings and share their resources. One didn’t need to play nice if he didn’t want to, but by doing so, everyone had a better chance in the wilderness.

From the fjords to the desert

Altruism is a force so ancient and powerful, especially during hard times, that it predates our own species. Anthropological findings have shown that Neanderthals, and probably other hominins of our genus homo, took care of their sick for years, as skeletal remains of people who lived many years after injury demonstrate.

If we zoom out a bit and borrow a point of view like that of Yuval Noah Harari in “Sapiens,” we may understand why informal institutions built upon trust among strangers allowed groups to survive in Europe’s Far North and in the depths of the Sahara desert. When traveling from one point to another under dire climatic conditions and no possibility of support networks, people established in desolate areas held hospitality as sacred, and anybody getting to their domains was welcome to share shelter and food for as long as necessary; perhaps once the snowstorm in the North, or the dust storm in the Sahara, would last for days.

For example, the institution of traditional transhumance—the right of pass of herders with their animal flocks to seasonally get to pastures from the valleys to the mountains—was a reality in many parts of the world before the dawn of agriculture. Many pastoralist societies across Europe and the Middle East established informal community rights to ensure their livestock’s survival. Paths used by shepherds in Spain, France, or the Balkans have been used for millennia. Slowly, the old paths were granted protection and “routes” developed. Soon, the idea of “communal rights” facilitated the coexistence between pastoralism and the emergent agrarian world.

N x little action = bigger action

If transhumance protected shepherds and their livestock, other equally ancient traditions granted protection and the right of pass to anybody traveling through desolate places. The customary diyya granted hospitality among peoples in the Sahara for centuries. Similarly, the concept of allemansrätten.

According to Doug Tompkins:

“The root of the environmental crisis is not just the obvious destruction of ecosystems or species; it’s the worldview that supports and drives it. We need a complete rethinking of the relationship between humans and the natural world.”

His friend (and commercial rival) Yvon Chouinard wrote in his autobiography, Let My People Go Surfing:

“The cure for depression is action. Every time I take action on something I feel good. I don’t worry about things beyond my control; I focus on what’s right in front of me.”

Perhaps, a better way to wrap up these notes is to include the musings that Albert Einstein wrote at his house in Princeton not long before dying, a quote that Henrik keeps at the viewing point of the WW2 bunker he converted:

“A human being, is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”