Sustainability - you must be getting tired of this term now. Do not worry. This is not a boring lecture on sustainability. I am just going to share a moral story from my MBA class. One Saturday afternoon, after good lunch, we were prepared for a mundane session on carbon dating, but, we were taken by surprise. We were told by the professor that we would play a game for the first half of the session. All of us were producers of timber wood and a part of a wood cartel (imaginary). Together we had 36 hectares of forest to cut. Each of us could choose to cut 0,1,2,3 hectares until we are completely depleted. At the end of each round, whatever hectare remained will double up for the next round. Guess what? We were depleted after round 2, since all 9 of us cut 3 hectares each. Rings a bell somewhere? This is true in every situation and is called "Tragedy of the commons". Anything that does not belong to us but can be utilized by us is prone to be overused or taken advantage of. We then reached a consensus is the game not to cut any hectares for 2 rounds until our forest replenishes. As expected, there was always a black sheep and to catch this one, we agreed to monitor who cheats by all cutting "0" hectares for the next 2 rounds. Now, there were more black sheep and there was one person who won the round by cutting the maximum number of hectares, as the game had dictated. But, we cannot call this person as our black sheep because he/she did participate truly in a few rounds where others cheated. Again, rings a bell? No problem is created by just one person. Everyone on earth is equally responsible for the climate issues we are facing and we need to fight it out together, not by pointing fingers or by finding a black sheep!
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